The Flog – The Fabry Log

My son is playing sports again. He’s been pestering us for three years, ever since we signed his brother and him up and I was elected coach of his previous team. We had five players.

It was a baseball team. That was a season that never ended, I’m still replaying it. But now he’s 12 and all grown up and ready to run the bases again. So he went to a couple of practices before the season starts and they were doing drills and I was standing around not thinking much about anything except how to stay cool in August in Arizona.

I wandered out onto the field to help. One group was taking batting practice and another group was in left field, so I thought I would stand between the two and “protect” the children (who were of varying ages and sizes). But I didn’t have a glove. It was just me barehanded standing there, watching, hoping.

Ten kids up. Ten kids barely hit the ball out of the infield. Until the Babe stepped in and belted one to left that went over my head by ten feet and I just stood there wondering what I would have done if I’d had a glove. Probably wouldn’t have helped, but still, hope springs eternal.

The ball landed between two six-year-olds who were laughing and pushing each other and doing anything but thinking of baseball. They must have heard me yelling, “Look out!” They didn’t flinch as the ball hit between them and rolled to the fence.

That’s when I remembered my glove, which is the point I’m getting to. A baseball glove is a sacred thing to a boy who loves baseball. You sleep with your glove. You eat with it. You sit on it on the bus. And when you’re in the outfield, if that’s where they banish you, you hold it to your face and smell the leather, the cowhide, and look at the names.

Writing on your glove is like writing in the Bible. Sort of. It felt like I was breaking some commandment. On the outside thumb I wrote, “Rose.” My favorite player. This was before the truth came out about Charlie Hustle, of course.

Tony Perez. Johnny Bench.

I couldn’t spell “Concepcion” back then, so I left him off the glove. This was not racist, it was spellist.

Foster. Griffey. The names went on.

In small letters I wrote “Menke” for Dennis Menke who played third one year. Or ten, I can’t remember. And one glorious summer I wrote “King.” Not for Martin Luther King, but Hal King, who hit a game-winning pinch-hit home run over the Dodgers in game 1 of a doubleheader the Reds swept. This was back when you bought one ticket and saw two games instead of the way they do it now, which makes me want to write other words on my glove.

Back then, back when you were a kid, a name meant something. You aspired to achieve like those on your glove. You aspired to play like a champion. To be the very best you could possibly be. To throw as hard as Don Gullett. To leap and catch a ball like Cesar Geronimo.

Lee May and Tommy Helms were on the glove in the summer of ’71. Both were traded. I couldn’t believe it. Who was this Joe Morgan fellow?

You never know whose name will wear off and whose name you’ll carry. Each summer I’d go over the names that needed to stay and change the ones that had gone.

This is life. What seems important one year will fade the next. The trick is to find what lasts early on and stick with it.

So whose name is on your glove?