When seventh grade was finally over and summer vacation began, I couldn’t wait to play baseball. The year before, I had played Little League in Tustin with my dad as an assistant coach, and there was no question that I was one of the stars on the team. But in Mesick, that pecking order had already been established, and I was more like in interloper coming in to disrupt things. Still, I had made friends over the course of the year thanks to my size and being recruited to play basketball, and I was one of the guys now. So, naturally, I wanted to play baseball, which was a sport I was actually good at and had experience playing.

To say that we were dominant as a baseball team would be an understatement. We crushed everyone in our path. These guys had been playing together practically since birth, and their roles were were established. Everyone knew who the pitchers were, who the catcher was, and who played each position. I, who had been used to playing first base, was cast aside in favor of two left-handed players. I was relegated instead to right field. Not because I had a good arm for that long throw to third, but because fewer balls were hit there than the other two fields. I had fielded fly balls for years on the playground, but playing organized outfield was different. I did have a good arm, far better than average, and I loved to unload from the outfield. I was pretty accurate, too. I was happy as long as I was playing.

Can you picture the movie, The Sandlot? Just kids playing in blue jeans and t-shirts? That’s who we were. Kastl Well Drilling was our sponsor, and it was written in black on the front of our orange t-shirts with our numbers on the backs. The head coach our team was Jerry McNitt, the local gas man who also had a trout farm. His son, Eric, was our best pitcher and one of the lefty first basemen I mentioned. Floyd Carpenter was his assistant. Floyd was married to Vonceille, who was the lady in town who cut everyone’s hair. No, I mean it. She was the only stylist in town as far as we boys went. Unless you wanted to drive 20-25 miles to Cadillac or Traverse City, Vonceille was the only game in town. She was also Monty Geiger’s mom, and he was one of my classmates and teammates. They lived right across from the ballfield, so it was convenient!

As the summer went on, I looked forward to Little League every day. There was nothing I loved more than playing baseball, even from a young age. It was one of the few things that I did that my abusive stepfather actually approved of. I still remember the thrill of getting my first baseball glove (from a garage sale) and playing catch with myself by bouncing a hard rubber ball off of the propane tank in our back yard. The cylindrical nature of the tank provided for fly balls, ground balls, and line drives, depending on the angle at which the ball hit the tank. Eventually, I received one of the best gifts ever, a Pitch-Back.

With the Pitch-Back, I could use an actual baseball, another wonderful Christmas gift. I was always amused that my Christmas gifts were usually things that I couldn’t use for months while we waited for good weather, but my dreams were filled with visions of using them, and that sure beat nightmares any time.

One thing I had never dealt with before in baseball but encountered for the first time in Mesick, was a curveball. For those of you who don’t deal in sports very much, a curveball is thrown with an angled spin that makes the ball change course in the air. It is NOT an optical illusion. The raised seams of the baseball provide resistance against the air in the direction of the spin, while the spin accelerates on the downward side. Bernoulli’s principle is at work here. For a right-handed pitcher throwing to a right-handed batter, you literally aim the ball at their lead shoulder, and the ideal pitch will break down and to the left, across the plate for a strike. That means to the batter, for a split-second, the ball looks like it is going to hit you. You have about half a second to determine if it’s a curveball or not, and whether to swing. You determine that by picking up the spin out of the pitcher’s hand as soon as possible. As a kid who had been hit a lot, I was not one to stay still in the box and find out. I flinched almost every single time. Throwing a curve ball puts a lot of tension on the elbow, so it’s generally not something you see until 12 or 13 years old. That added a whole new element to baseball for which I was unprepared.

Still, our team dominated every area team, going undefeated for the entire summer. We beat one team in Grawn 38-0. By the end, we were all batting opposite handed so as not to run up the score even more. When victorious, our coaches would take us to the Dari-Pit for ice cream.

This, of course, was the same place my grandma used to take my brother Jeff and me for ice cream, and I knew I loved those banana boats. When it was my turn to order, I ordered the banana boat. The other players jumped on me immediately. Banana splits were for players who hit a home run. Everyone else just got a vanilla or chocolate cone. I was devastated to have committed such a faux pas with my new team. I overreacted and refused any ice cream at all, because I had been conditioned to prepare for punishment for making such a mistake. The coaches wouldn’t hear of it, though, and were great. They just told me gently to check with them next time. This, like so many other instances growing up in Mesick, was a kindness that I would never forget. It was the polar opposite of what I was used to, and how I was used to being treated. Teachers and now coaches were proving to be positive models for adult behavior which I would emuate in my own adult years.