By Rick Harsch
Laboring at…laboring out…an introduction to what is necessarily to be written in diary form, scheming, strategizing—how to present the background without boring the shit out of the reader—weeks are passing and a late, cruel Mediterranean winter onslaught has yielded to the inevitable early spring of even this northernmost Medterrain, and that means vis a vis this here, that before long the boys I intend to chronicle through their baseball year will be practicing outside, maybe as soon as tomorrow (I am expecting notice to that effect). I have no choice but to introduce as I proceed, so in that vein, in the spirit of this belated if obvious awakening, let me say before continuing in re continental baseball that while I am six feet two inches tall, or about 188 centimeters, Arjun, now 14 years old, is closing in rapidly, about 5’ 9”, and his hands are already larger than mine. We checked it last night. I knew his hands had finally grown to match mine but could not recall if they had gone on to leave mine short. They have. A monkey could bite off a length—as a chimp once munched one of Jane Goodall’s digits—and he would still have the edge…so to speak. I have small hands relative to my height, while my wife has good long fingers, Indian fingers, south Indian fingers, the kind that when long and slender one imagines to be classic, long, slender Indian fingers, even if there is every likelihood that the Tamil on average has precisely the same hand size as the Scotch-Irish-Danish-English-German-French mix of Arjun’s father’s people. Maybe that’s got something to do with the movement he has for several years been able to get on his pitches, which are finally beginning to combine that movement with a speed that, should chronic inaccuracy not scotch the whole works, may elevate him to the elite among his mound-climbing peers.
What happened in regard to continental baseball is that having moved to Slovenia, leaving the United States behind, positioning myself on the Slavic side of Europe yet where my wife would gain climatically by proximity to the Adriatic, having been long in the US Midwest, I was approached by students at the university where I taught in Portorož, Slovenia, two of them on separate occasions, and neither actual students of mine, and asked if I might want to manage their baseball team. It’s just like baseball to come calling when least expected (leaving the US I didn’t give the loss of baseball a thought; but I should have, for I was soon closeted in an English department with a Twins fan, something I would wish on no one I felt neutral or better towards). Having long been a fan, having managed here and there—the high point being a group of foreigners at a university who never actually played a game; the low point steering a group of softballing women who were damn serious about results in a Kenosha working league—I answered in the affirmative when the second to approach actually gave a date and place, before even giving the matter the least thought…with the result that when I showed up in the nearby Slovene port city of Koper on the gravel lot that was to be ours for the next several years and was handed the reigns, I had to improvise, that is to say coax an appearance of leadership quality to my projected surface. I still remember the striding along the sidelines as they played catch, noting that Martin Mavrič, who had finalized the deal, had a relatively good arm, throwing the ball more or less like a real baseball player.
But what was next? We practiced. I no doubt hit grounders and fly balls. I could still pitch, even throw a curve, if slowly enough the best tennis player among them could wait on it, calculate the movement, and, being a lefty, guide it along the third base line, which is where the grass was high, where the balls disappeared, where the nutria moved freely as there was a canal nearby. Just ask Simon, the manager who took my place at the end of the year after I resigned. He hated losing balls so much he refused to sanction batting practice. (I saw his ex-wife today, incidentally, and his son, who recognized me, the genial little winner of fading hearts, Aleksander.) I tried to make as many practices as possible during those years, for as a coach I could still make decisions when Simon wasn’t around and the players found the batting sessions so liberating the righties pulled just about everything, which meant into the nutria brush and though we were never entirely out of balls, we seldom finished a practice with more than a few left.
So we practiced, yes, but for what? For games. There would be games. So there must be a league of sorts. Yes, yes, in fact, the leagues were common to most European nations, and Slovenia was included. Before that year they had four teams, three in Ljubljana and one in Škofija loka (pop. 11,800), the Foxes of Kranj (pop. 37,373) or Kranjski Lisjaki, for some reason not the Škofija loka anything. Probably the majority of players were from the larger Kranj, but had no field, while Škofija loka had the field and no players and so the argument regarding the name was one-sided—to my ultimate benefit, for to this day I enjoy rather overmuch saying aloud The Foxes of Kranj. I know of one large and unpleasant man who seems to actually be diminished by my saying it with a near British deliberation—he played first base for them back then.
Not having a field in town is no laughing matter. Our team was new, joining the league along with a team from the town of Novo mesto (pop. 23,000), which didn’t, for some reason, give themselves a nickname, joining the Ljubljana teams of Golovec and Ježice as essentially nameless teams. We were, being coastal, The Swordfish, Mečarice, and I have no doubt the founding players of Mečarice imagined getting a field somewhere in the reclaimed land in the port region—Koper, formerly the Italian Capodistria (Koper means dill, so it is as prosaic in comparison to its historical name is you might guess), which was an island that became attached to land, and then more land as it needed to accommodate the port of a nation, first one of many ports of Yugoslavia (which once considered building an airport here and constructing a port where there are now historic tourist attracting salt pans adjacent to the Croatian border, even mixing with the Croatian border as they are in a bay that is split between the two nations), and now the only port of a nation with a coastline approximately 47 kilometers long. The old city is now ringed by new constructions and vast acreages of nutria teeming, canal-crossed fields, many of them converted into outdoor sporting facilities. Back in the summer of 2003 it was easy to imagine spending a year or two practicing on our gravel parking lot for a couple years before a humble baseball stadium was provided us. Alas, it never happened, and after some time the Mečarice were extinct.
But not before some grand efforts to prove we belonged in the Slovene major leagues. Indelible is our 39 to 1 loss to Jezice, along with several other lopsided scores from that year, which yet included a victory, over Novo mesto: Mečarice 40, Novo mesto 4. I pitched in that game. I was a legend of a kind, the American guy, asked before that Novo mesto game by one of their players if I had really played in the Major Leagues. Not really, I replied, leaving a great deal of leeway open for interpretation. I pitched a solid inning, my last ever in competition, giving up one hit, one unearned run, striking out one and walking one. I played part-time. I was about 43 years old on a team that averaged perhaps 23 years of age, a team of several great athletes, none of whom had played competitive organized baseball before that season. Ljubljana, on the other hand, actually had little league, highly organized, and their adult teams had on the roster players who had been at it most of their lives. The Foxes of Kranj even had Jesus, formerly a professional at some level in the New World. I benched myself when he pitched. I was never not a legend, but the meaning of that is in my assertion of self as manager from a land that knows baseball rather than as a player of any worth. It became clear to me early on that when it came to the society of players, coaches, managers and umpires, the Slovenes had it all wrong. The umpires were tyrannical, rather like airport security guards, nearly apart from the game itself, a bit like severe robots. They also tended not to be expertly versed in the rules of the game and, this is already evident, they lacked common sense. Nobody argued with them and this simply would not do. I was asked, as a man from the land of baseball, to manage a fledgling team, to introduce this team as it were, to the world of organized baseball—and that simply would not have been possible without teaching my players and any opposing players and their staffs, even the umpires themselves, that in the game of baseball the umpire is the enemy of mankind and if you think he’s wrong he more than likely is, and if you think that you must needs get the point across to him…Else injustice reigns.
I’ve published an account of this process and its delights elsewhere (Chapter 13: The Inherent Human Transgression That Is Umpiring: A Slovene Case Study, in ANATOMY OF BASEBALL, SMU press, 2008, ed. Lee Gutkind, forward by Yogi fucking Berra!) so I’ll get on with what matters regarding my son and his baseball career and the phenomenon of Italian little league baseball. We never got ourselves a field, but some enterprising member of the team managed to get us a home field one year up in Villa Opicina, Italy, which is where at the aforementioned karstal grounds I played my last competitive ball at the age of about 48, batting precisely .400, 4 for 10, one of those four being a double that remains in my physical memory reservoir and will until on my deathbed I bedevil the hospice nurses with the event, a pitch lower than my waste on the outside part of the plate, let’s call it a curve, that I met with full speed of wrist and coordinated arm action, absorbing that nonpareil feeling older men get when they realize they are going to make it somewhere they don’t often arrive to, in this case second base on the trot. One of those ten hits was a hard grounder to third that Simon judged an error and I altered in the scorebook to read single, as I believe it fell in that category of indefinite that because the god of baseball is good awards the more positive result all the way around. The batter gets a hit, the fielder is not charged with an error, and if the pitcher is indeed punished with the mark of baseball Cain for the hit, he is at least assured the runner will not advance home if the next batter does not put the ball out of the park. Mercifully, the season ended in a benign definitive fashion. We were going up against the latest new team, Maribor (pop. 95,000, no nick-name), upstarts truly, but they had us by a run when I came to bat with two runners in scoring position and two outs in the last inning, a mere teenager on the mound. Perhaps a ball taken, a foul ball, who knows: what is quite true is that before long I saw a pitch I could surely drive, and did drive—I mean, I really connected—and I lowered my head gamely, for if running all the way to second was the thing to do I was going to find a way…yes, I lowered my head and as I was rounding first saw Maribor celebrating…what to me was a ball ripped to left center was described to my face later with no little mockery as a bit of a lofted liner-type, wounded bird flighty ball the shortstop did not even have to back up for to catch easily.
MAINTENANCE ENDS 