That people would also utterly misunderstand me, as opposed to the reverse, was a thing, all right, and it started early: in high school baseball. I was slumping on the bench next to the coach, a dim fellow named Gary Moore. He was a thick person, big fingers, big shoulders, big thighs, simply a large person, though no taller than my 5’10” (I’ve shrunk, OK??). He wore black-framed glasses and an open-mouthed, blank stare.
I was a pitcher, and I didn’t know where I stood with him. It was true that he had allocated me one of the four pitching jackets available for the starting pitchers; not one of the jocks, I was secretly proud of having earned it.
It was impossible to know what the coach thought about anyone. He was difficult to talk to; he was the kind of man whose approach was belligerence: “Wull, I don’t know about THAT,” he’d say, about just about anything. It occurs to me that I don’t recall what he taught, but it must have been something. So I aimed to ingratiate myself.
High school baseball in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida was a strange thing. Practice started on January 2, which was often pretty cold. We played on an open field with no fence, and on some days the ocean wind would mistral over the field, creating dust storms. The good thing was that our home field was situated so that a pitcher would be throwing into the ocean wind, and if, like me, you depended on your curve ball, the wind slowed it down, backed it up, and made it curve like a sumbitch no matter how badly you spun it.
As I slouched next to the coach, some kid failed to do a very simple thing; he was to hold his bat out so that the ball hit his bat and dropped down into fair territory: that’s called a bunt. The point of it usually is to make the infielders scramble to field a short little dribble and throw it to first so that the person on first or second can move up a base unmolested. If the other team was unsuspecting, or badly coached (us), who knows what might happen—the third baseman might field the ball and in a panic whip it down the first baseline into right field, and then everyone is running on everyone else’s heels and it’s a lot of fun.
I said to the baseball mind that was Gary Moore, “No one seems to want to learn how to bunt anymore.” This is a truism now—major leaguers advance to the plate seemingly intent on appearing to be the worst bunters in history, apparently so that they won’t be asked again. (As I am revising this, Travis d’Arnaud of the Mets blew a bunt with first and second and no one out and ended up popping up. The Mets failed to score.) Not a good strategy for job security, but then, I never made the major leagues so what do I know?
A parenthetical: I understand the impulse to fail strategically. For some reason, perhaps my crush on Elizabeth Cleere, who was also in the class, in college I took a couple of quarters of Oral Interpretation. The professor was in love with all things Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, and I was in love with all things Updike and Cheever. Yankee that I was, we weren’t going to get along.
The Oral Interp kids and the professor were bound to present to the general public, and they chose some short story or other that was very southern. The professor forced me to audition, though I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
Someone asked me to read some lines that included the word “bream”, meaning a sort of fish, and I pronounced it as it’s spelled. The southern boys and girls smirked at each other; it’s pronounced “brim”. Who outside of Alabama knew? OK, I’ll confess: I knew. I faked it. Anyway, I was duly pardoned from the play. Well, this story doesn’t prove my point about those who refuse to learn to bunt, as I still got an A in the course. Probably everyone did. In any event, Elizabeth Cleere wasn’t impressed.
My point in making my statement about how no one wanted to learn to bunt had everything to do with wanting to be acknowledged and accepted as a baseball player by our coach. He wasn’t subtle about favoring the jocks. I wanted to thrust myself in, become as trusted as they were.
Moore was, as I said, though, pretty dim. He didn’t teach anyone anything; he just criticized performance generally, and, when I pitched, he actually scared me to death, he was so gruff, grim, and incapable of praise.
In trying to explain the coach’s incompetence, Kenny Day, the best player on the team and our team’s leader, said, well, when Moore was a kid, he was probably just hopeless, like the worst kids on the team. Before Moore came out one day, Kenny walked over to first base, kicked it, nodded, and, in imitation of the coach’s low and redneck voice, intoned, “Yup, that’s a bag awright.” Later we’d describe the act of trying hopelessly to solve a seemingly simple problem as “Mooreing it out.”
Kenny started each practice by sprinting out to the field and singing, “Baseball, baseball!” It was one of the most pure expressions of joy I’ve ever heard. Of course, Kenny could hit the hell out of a baseball. When he threatened to transfer to Stranahan High, Moore said, “I’ll put my boot up your ass.” I always wondered how he’d do that if Kenny were at Stranahan. Gary would, I’m sure, have Moored it out.
So after I announced that no one wanted to learn to bunt, Moore said, “That’s the problem with you, Jarecke, you don’t want people to take responsibility for doing anything.” He wasn’t joking. Ironically, it’s a hot button for me, people refusing to take responsibility for mistakes. Nancy and I wrote a book about it.
I sat, stunned, not looking at him. What? I plucked at the zipper of my prized pitching jacket, wondering if I’d heard wrong. That was the opposite of what I was trying to say. There was, of course, no answer to that. I realized, this is how it’s going to be: no one is going to get me. I was right. All that was left to think was, Yup, that’s a bag, all right. Throughout the rest of my life, I haven’t been disappointed in my assumption that people don’t get me. I used to think it was my fault, but now I don’t know. They’re busy Mooreing it out.
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