Nice Throw, Lefty
I was out for my afternoon walk through the neighborhood a few days ago. I walk every day except when I don’t, following the same 2.65-mile route I’ve walked for several years now. As I passed by the small lake at the halfway point, I counted the geese (8 that day) and turned to come down Beverly Lane, a street with several families with children. Just past the new house under construction, I spotted a gaggle of young boys with a baseball and gloves. Without breaking stride, I waved and walked on. After I’d gotten 20 yards or so past them, I heard one of the boys say to another, “You go get it.” to which came the reply, “No, you get it. You threw it.” And then at that moment I saw it. The baseball came rolling down the street right between my legs. Without looking back, I hollered, “I’ll get it!” Whereupon I walked on to where the ball came to rest in the gutter another 20 yards farther. I picked it up, turned and threw a fine, low arcing pitch that landed with a pop in the middle of the glove of the youngster who had stepped out in front of the others. “Thanks,” he said. I grinned then turned and continued my walk. I had gone just a few more paces when, another boy from the pack shouted, “Nice throw, Lefty!” Well, that just made my day!
I’ve had baseball on my mind a lot lately. That incident is just one reason. The recently completed SEC tournament and College World Series is another. And then just yesterday, as I sat down to watch a little TV while I ate my lunch, I discovered that the Little League World Series was on. Seeing a southpaw on the mound, I had to watch for a bit.
There’s much about the game of baseball that I like—everything really—but I always enjoy watching the pitchers. Watching MSU’s ace righthander Will Bednar’s masterful performance in Game #3 of the College World Series was a marvel to behold—he’ll earn millions with that arm if he stays healthy. But I particularly enjoy watching the lefties, like me. It always brings back memories of my stint as a lefthanded Little League pitcher.
I became a baseball fan as a tot, watching the Major League Sunday Game of the Week with Daddy. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll probably recall that Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese were fixtures in the broadcast booth for those nationally televised broadcasts during the 1950s and ’60s, with Pee Wee calling play-by-play and Dizzy providing the color commentary—and colorful indeed was his homespun banter. Many a time we were laughing and cackling at the things he would say. As far as I'm concerned, Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese were the best baseball announcing team in history.
And if you’re a Mississippian of a certain age, you’ll also surely recall that Ol’ Diz, the son of an Arkansas sharecropper, married a girl from Bond, Mississippi, a small town in Stone County. Bond is a couple of miles north of Wiggins, the county seat, and is within hollering distance of upper Big Level where my family lived. Dizzy and his wife, Patricia, spent a lot of time in Bond and Wiggins and we reveled every time he mentioned that fact on TV. They moved down there when he retired from broadcasting in the late ’60s. I could go on about this Hall of Famer’s major league career, telling you of his 30 wins in the 1934 season as the ace pitcher of the St. Louis Cardinals’ “Gashouse Gang” the year they won the World Series, but that’s another story.
I learned the game early, as most boys my age did when we were growing up. My brother Keith and I would often hone our throwing and catching skills in the yard at home. Those games of catch would inevitably turn into contests of burnout. My first glove, a hand-me-down righthander’s glove that I wore on the wrong hand, offered little padding from Keith’s hotly-thrown pitches that always seemed to be intended to inflict pain. I quickly learned how to either catch the ball in the web or to step out of the way and knock it down. But don’t get me started on the trials and tribulations, perils even, of being left-handed in a righthanded world. It can be sinister—literally. But that’s also a topic for another day. Later, when I got my first lefthander’s glove, my fielding skills improved considerably.
Keith, Judy, and 4th-grade me waiting for the school bus, September 1962. Notice that I’m wearing my lefthander’s baseball glove.
Often Daddy would spend time with us playing catch or hitting us some fly balls and grounders. He also worked with me on my pitching. He claimed that I had a natural curveball that many southpaw pitchers have. I’d heard Dizzy and Pee Wee explaining the reasons for that but didn’t fully understand it. I liked the sound of it, though, and began to regard my odd handedness as an advantage rather than a handicap. Daddy spent hours working with me on my pitching speed and accuracy until I had a pretty decent fastball. I loved making his glove pop such that he’d have to take it off to rub his hand. Some of that may have been his theatrics, but I ate it up. He showed me how to grip the ball with my middle finger along the bottom seam and release with a slight flick of the wrist to enhance the ball’s rotation and its downward curving movement. I ate that up too.
There were impromptu games in our front pasture with my cousins, with dried cow patties for bases, and plenty of hit-arounds and pick-up games at recess at Home School in Big Level where I was enrolled through the 8th grade. At times, our principal, Mr. Gordon, would step in and umpire our games if there was too much arguing going on. Those were good times and there were some boys with a fair amount of talent for a little country school.
But one thing we didn’t have out in that rural community was a Little League program. For that, you’d have to go into town. And a few of us did. Since Daddy worked in town as a mechanic at the Chevrolet place, he enrolled both Keith and me, when we were the right age, in the Wiggins Little League program. Keith, being older than me, played a couple of years before I started. We each played two seasons, but our playing years did not overlap. He played first base and could hit and field with the best on his team, hitting a homerun and making several key plays in his very first game. My first game? I was on the bench for the first few innings before being sent out to right field. I got a walk to first base and eventually scored when the boys in the top of the batting order came up. It wasn’t a stellar beginning, but I didn’t make any errors. I was proud of that and proud to be on the Kiwanis team, wearing that hot, scratchy pinstripe uniform.
Our team practiced a couple of afternoons a week. Mama or Judy would drive me into town and drop me off at the ballfield at the corner of Parker St. and Border Ave. adjacent to Stone High. During school, that field was used for PE and the marching band. It’s now a parking lot for the high school. After practice I’d walk the few blocks over to Star Chevrolet where it was then located on First Street near Pine Hill to wait in the shop for Daddy to get off at 5:30. On one of those occasions Dizzy Dean was there waiting for Daddy to finish servicing his car. When I walked up, Daddy whispered to me, “Do you know who that is?” Of course, I did. Even if I’d been blindfolded, I would’ve recognized Dizzy Dean by his big, boisterous voice. When Daddy closed the car’s hood and started wiping his greasy hands on a shop rag, Ol’ Diz came over to shake his hand. Noticing me and my lefthander’s glove, Dizzy remarked to Daddy, addressing him by his nickname, as everybody did, “Well, Punk, I see you’ve got young Whitey with you today.” That got a big grin and a laugh from Daddy, but I was glad he didn’t speak to me directly, for I was too shy to say anything. Again, for those of you who are too young to know, Diz’s reference to Whitey wasn’t some racist remark; he was referring to Whitey Ford, the star pitcher for the New York Yankees during the 1950s and ’60s. I couldn’t have been prouder; the lefthanded Whitey had long been my idol. I could also go on about this Hall of Famer’s career, but that, too, will have to wait.
Two or three games into that first Little League season, from the bench where I sat in the second inning, I saw Daddy having a conversation with the coach. They were standing behind the fence and a few feet from the dugout. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but it was obviously about my pitching. While our team was batting, the coach called me over and had me throw him a few pitches. I gave him my best fastballs. I wanted to give him a curveball or two but thought better of it, as those tended to be a bit erratic. As we were about to take the field in the third inning, the coach handed me the ball and sent me to the mound. Lawsy, I don’t think I’d ever had that many eyes on me! However, my teammates gave me lots of cheerful chatter. Tommy Hall, our catcher, was particularly encouraging, even after digging a few of my pitches out of the dirt.
I’d like to tell you I pitched a masterful game that night, a performance that would’ve made Whitey proud, but it didn’t happen. The truth is I gave up a few hits, walked a few batters, and struck out only one. By the fourth inning my arm was getting plenty sore and my pitches were becoming wilder. By the fifth inning, I was back in right field. But, for the remainder of that year and for the next, I would occasionally be called on to pitch, sometime starting the game, but invariably my arm would tire after two or three innings. The coach tried me on third base some, and for several games I’d go from the mound to third before finishing the game in right field. I enjoyed every bit of it. The only time I embarrassed myself was during a game in the middle of my second season. I was playing third and we were up by a few runs. Just the inning before, I’d fielded a line drive and threw out the runner on first before he could tag up—my first and only double play. When we took the field in the next inning I was feeling pretty cocky. The very first batter pop-fouled straight up making an easy catch for Tommy. With one quick out and no runners on base, he began to throw the ball around-the-horn. I, on the other hand, was doing a little cheer and dance, completely oblivious to his throw to me. I ducked when the ball whizzed past my ear. Play then stopped while I chased the ball down. I don’t remember much after that, other than all the groaning.
Strangely, though I played for two seasons with many of the same boys, I have only vague images in my memory of them. I don’t remember the coach’s name or those of any of the players other than Tommy. He’s the only person I can clearly recall. Admittedly, though, he was a memorable character. Gregarious and always laughing and smiling, everybody liked him. He was an overweight kid, but that didn’t slow him down a bit when he was scrambling after a wild pitch. He was a grade ahead of me, and we later had a couple of classes together in high school.
It may be that the biggest reason I liked Tommy so much was that he owned a minibike, just like the ones advertised in the back pages of Boy’s Life magazine that I’d been drooling over for years. Though Tommy was a bit big for it, he would ride it to and from his dad’s store, Hall’s Grocery on Pine Avenue, to our practices. You could hear him coming before you saw him, given the loud unmuffled lawnmower engine on that little bike. It was like Norm stepping into the bar on “Cheers.” Everybody yelled, “Here comes Tommy!”
A page from the March 1963 issue of Boys’ Life showing one of the minibikes I drooled over as a kid.
As I was cleaning out some old newspapers a few days ago, thumbing through them to see what I may have missed, I was saddened to find Tommy’s obituary from a few weeks ago. I don’t know the cause of his death, nor had I seen him since those long-ago school days, but here’s another person from my youth who’s gone much too soon.
Like I said, I’ve had baseball on my mind a lot lately.
Thomas Edward “Tommy” Hall (29 Oct 1952 – 25 Jun 2021)
The Hattiesburg American, 30 Jun 2021 p2A
Notes:
What Really Gives Left-Handed Pitchers Their Edge? (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-really-gives-left-handed-pitchers-their-edge/)
The Left Hand of (Supposed) Darkness (https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sinister-left-dexter-right-history)
WORDs TO PONDER
sin·is·ter (adj): malicious, underhanded, from Old French sinistre or Latin sinister. Today’s meaning of sinister, as evil or malevolent in some way, comes from the Latin word simply meaning “on the left side.” “Left” being associated with evil likely comes from a majority of the population being right-handed, biblical texts describing God saving those on the right on Judgment Day, and images depicting Eve on Adam’s left. Consequently, the Latin for “right,” dexter, finds its way into positive words like dexterous, and the French word for right (droit) is found in adroit.
Source: merriam-webster.com
southpaw (noun): A left-handed pitcher. For decades, the southpaw origin story was a logical one: In the days before lighting systems made night games possible, most ballparks were oriented so that the batter would be looking east out to the mound in order to avoid having to stare into the glare of the afternoon sun. So, with pitchers facing west when they stared into home plate, the arm of a left-handed hurler would be to the south side of the diamond. However, the earliest mentions of the term in baseball refer to position players, not pitchers. According to MLB official historian John Thorn, baseball has a totally different sport to thank: boxing, in which hitting someone with a left hand came to be known as a punch using the “south paw.”
Source: mlb.com/glossary
SONG of the Day
“The Greatest” by Kenny Rogers (She Rides Wild Horses, 1999)
Bonus track
“Yesterday” by The Beatles (Yesterday and Today, 1966)