One More Time on Baseball
On this final weekend of the regular major league baseball season, always one of the most nostalgic times of the year, a confession, sort of, is in order. Baseball was the most important thing in my life in my college years, especially since I broke out in my second year to become our junior college team’s most valuable player. My last two years of college were paid for by a full baseball scholarship and I had one pro offer which I declined because in those days you could not play college if you ever signed a pro contract.
In my last college year, I believe it was, I was also working as a stringer at our local newspaper and among other things, I called in the results of our college games for the paper. One game on the road, I hit a wind-blown pop fly that handed behind the second baseman that went for a double and wound up driving in our winning run.
But when I called in the result to the newspaper’s sports desk, a friend took the call who subsequently, unknownst to me, wrote the story as if I had hit a powerful drive for that winning hit. I am sure he thought he was doing me a big favor. But I was horrified, knowing that my teammates would know how incorrect it was and would be blaming me for it. Sadly, since I was painfully introverted and lacked sufficient verbal communication skills to set the record straight with my teammates, nothing was said.
I went many years never thinking about that incident until I read the book by my teammate that year, Ron Shelton (yes, the same Ron Shelton who penned the screenplay for the movie “Bull Durham” and other sports-related films). Ron’s book, entitled “The Church of Baseball,” is a good read, subtitled “The Making of Bull Durham.” Since playing together in college and a summer or two of semi-pro ball in Santa Barbara, California, where we both grew up, I’ve never been in touch with Ron, who’s had a terrific writing career after making it as high as the AAA minor leagues in baseball.
On Page 232 of his book, he recalled an incident from his very early years and wrote about a young man we both knew, Jerry Georges, a talented player and a very lovely person who wound up being killed in Vietnam, one of two friends I knew that suffered that fate. Shelton wrote about pitching to Georges as an 11-year-old. “I remember pitching to Jerry Georges with a 2-0 lead anda 3-2 counter with the bases loaded in the last inning of the Midget League Championship in Laguna Park. Jerry hit a lazy fly ball to the left fielder who dropped it. Three runs scored and we lost….I remember the day the paper said that Jerry Georges doubled in three runs to win the game. It was a goddamn error, not a double. Who wrote that?…I remember ten years later Jerry, by then a U.S. Marine, stepped on a land mine in Quang Tri Province, Vietnam, and didn’t come home.”
Well, I can’t help but wonder if Shelton, and the other of my teammates, felt the same anger toward me thinking I was responsible for the mischaracterization in the paper of my wind-blown hit/ So permit me to let this stand as my confession, my apology if I must own it, and I guess I do, for that misreporting, even though I never suggested it or wrote it. Sorry Ron, but much moreso, sorry for our shared loss of Jerry.
