Some Home Runs You Never Forget
In baseball, we wait as much as we watch, so when something happens it gives us just a little more to remember. We play a game of home run derby and, just for a second, witness perfection.
This is Chapter 9 of The Stories We Tell, a nostalgic lookback on friendship, growing up, and the hopes we have of becoming heroes. It’s The Wonder Years meets The Sandlot with sprinklings of Friday Night Lights.
New stories are published (almost) weekly.
For a list of all chapters, please visit: Chapter List - The Stories We Tell.
We used to disappear into games of home run derby in Ryan’s backyard. Some days, we’d go out just after breakfast, while the sun wiped the last bits of sleep from its eyes, and the morning air felt cool enough to start the game in a sweatshirt.
Other days, we’d cling to the last bits of dusk, beating back the night with trash talk and a skinny, yellow wiffleball bat.
Home plate was a patch of dirt worn into the grass at one end of the twenty-five-yard-long backyard. Some swings we’d crouch low near the plate and be Kirby Puckett. Other times it was Will Clark, the way he’d bunch his shirt into his shoulders. Or Julio Franco twisted like a question mark. Gary Sheffield scowled and growled and rage-wiggled his bat at the bitcher every time he entered the batter’s box.
We pretended to be him, too.
We’d play for hours, day after day, and always in Ryan’s backyard, which actually made little sense. Not us playing home run derby, of course, but playing at Ryan’s because of the large tree lurking in the backyard.
The tree was a terrible menace in right field, our version of the Green Monster in left at Fenway. Smack a line drive, and the tree would smack it right back at you. Think your laser shot might reach the upper deck? Think again, and watch it crash land for an easy out.
The tree made it silly to play in Ryan’s back yard, but we played there anyway. And we played there because Ryan’s backyard had the thing none of our yards had—a six-foot tall wood privacy fence separating it from his neighbors.
When you’re young and not big or strong enough to hit a real baseball over a real fence on a real diamond of any length, the closest substitute is sending one over a makeshift wall in a pickup game in someone’s backyard or while kids look on with envy on a sandlot.
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine you’re ten again.
You’re standing in the July sun with your shoes pressed to the still soft, green grass. The yellow plastic bat above your shoulders wiggles with your wrists. A few dots of white clouds accent the deep, blue sky.
The breeze is light, and your stomach rumbles because lunch is around the corner. Sweat beads drop from your forehead and run down the back of your neck.
The pitch comes belt high. You swing. Feel bat on ball and watch the baseball climb toward the sun until it clears whatever fence is in the distance.
The home run trot is yours to take. And, even if just for those seconds, you feel like a big leaguer.
What could be better?
The morning after Ken Griffey Jr. did something nobody had ever done on a baseball field, we played our own game of home run derby in Ryan’s backyard.
Ryan had one out left and trailed Mike by one home run. B and I stood in the outfield, already out of outs in the day's game. A light breeze whispered into the green leaves in the big tree over my head.
Mike stood in the center of the yard where we’d set the pitcher’s mound. He wound up and fired.
Batting right-handed, Ryan smoked a line drive into left field. B burst toward the fence and leapt, but it wasn’t enough. The plastic ball whistled off the tips of his fingers before flying over the fence and into the neighbor's yard.
“Jobu! Yes!" Ryan yelled and kissed the meat of the yellow bat.
Now tied with Mike, Ryan stood square on home plate and looked out into the morning sky, taking his time before what could be the game’s final swing.
Baseball, unlike football or basketball, is a game played without a clock. This timelessness is something that, especially as a kid looking to attach meaning to moments in the sports we played, intrigued me.
Moments take their time to develop in baseball, bubbling up slowly before reaching a boil.
The way the sun might turn behind a cloud while the pitcher digs their cleats into the dirt. How a batter might undo and redo their gloves before stepping into the box.
A loose button on a jersey.
A wayward sunflower seed stuck on a chin.
The wiggle of a bat at home plate while in the outfield someone shuffles their spikes and pounds their glove.
In baseball, we wait as much as we watch, so when something happens it gives us just a little more to remember.
Ryan stood on home plate basking in the sun a moment longer. Then, he did something none of us had seen before. He moved to the other side of the plate. In a tie game, with no outs to spare, Ryan was going to swing left-handed.
There were no flashbulbs or cameras to capture what happened next. Just the moment and our memories of it.
Ryan turned his cap backwards and tapped the inside of each shoe twice with the bat. He stood taller than usual, with less bend in his knees. He held the bat so it pointed toward the heavens and wiggled his wrists, letting the bat sway some overhead. He grinned - playful but with some mischief - at Mike and let his smirk talk the trash the moment needed.
Mike rubbed the ball between his hands and dug into the grass with his foot. He reared back and ripped a fast ball toward home plate.
Ryan's front shoulder dipped slightly, and the bat followed. They moved lower, at first, then powered through their upswing. Bat hunting ball, and all of it felt like it played out in slow motion. I watched as Ryan’s smile even grew a little bigger.
“Pop!”
The plastic ball exploded off the yellow bat, arcing over the tree and past the fence, a spec of white soaring magically in a sea of blue, rising and rising until it had traveled too far for any eyes to see.
We never heard the ball land or found it afterward, so the legend only grew.
Ryan, so the story went, hit the ball so far and so hard it reached into the heavens where it would stay forever, a gift from our group of friends to all the generations of kids before us, who - like us - grew up believing in heroes and the majesty of moments.
I still feel goosebumps when I think back and picture that morning.