Ghost Runner on Third
It's spooky season. Here's a ghost story.
It’s October and that means playoff baseball and pumpkin spice, sweatshirts and shorts weather, and, of course, spooky stories. I had mentioned early on in my Substack adventure that I’d throw in a few short stories from my upcoming collection entitled Captured Ghosts. Here’s one combining baseball and ghosts. I hope you like it.
Six in the evening is the best time to play baseball.
The heat of the summer day has finally dissipated to a comfortable level. Fans, players, coaches, and umpires welcome the disappearance of the unforgiving sun. For some strange reason, the smell of cut grass is sweeter at dusk, and vision blinded by daily concerns is now focused on the ball, bat, and glove.
The games were always in the early evening when I thought I could still play. Twelve years old and pretending to be Gary Templeton, that is, until Ozzie Smith became a lifelong Cardinal.
We never had enough kids in my neighborhood to play nine to a side, so we ingeniously came up with a solution. If you were still on base and it was your turn again to bat, you yelled, “Ghost runner on first!” and headed back to the batter’s box. The players on both sides had to remember the ghost runners, and there were a few fights over whether the ghost runner on third scored on routine grounders to second.
I played shortstop on the local Little League team, not because I was the best player, but because my Dad was the coach. I had some talent, to be sure, but as soon as they started throwing curveballs, my playing days were over. I faced pitchers who later became doctors, lawyers, and one who even made it to the big leagues. The fact that I got one of my few hits, a looping fly ball that found the gap, off this future big-league pitcher makes me smile. It’s a screaming line drive in the scorebook.
I’ve always been fascinated with athletes. Seeing how comfortable they are shooting baskets, running the 440, and finessing their way to touchdowns. Playing center field seems super-human to me. Their feats on the field and court surpassed anything I could ever do.
So, I started writing about them. I followed the area basketball, football, and track teams. However, my local newspaper columns were all about baseball.
Some ballplayers are as far away from athletic-looking as possible, with pudgy middles, stubby legs, and almost always eyes too small for their faces. This everyman aspect of baseball makes it identifiable to an eight-year-old who dreams of playing for the Cardinals, the Yankees, or, unfortunately, even the Cubs.
You can watch professional baseball players on TV and see a tall, lanky left-hander on the mound, unable to hit the kind of heat he can throw, against a broad-shouldered boy from Kentucky with a piece of pine in his hands. It is these types of match-ups that make baseball the American pastime.
Baseball isn’t life, but it’s been my life for nearly all my forty years. After almost twenty years at the newspaper, I took my first real summer vacation. I wanted to find some real baseball Americana that doesn’t exist on the coasts of LA or New York.
I had just parked my black ‘72 Ford Mustang in this downtown that time forgot. I didn’t know what state I was in. I stopped looking at my map a week ago and never once clover-leafed onto an interstate. I was in Anytown, USA. I could blink, and I was in Sheriff Taylor’s Mayberry. Blink again, and it was Clark Kent’s Smallville. I had no idea.
Getting out of the car, the heat of the day lingered. I looked up and down Main Street’s ghost-town atmosphere and found no one. A flock of birds took to the air as the courthouse clock rang out a single note. I looked up at the face, and the giant hands formed five-thirty. The sun was thinking about taking a nap, and twilight was creeping in.
I stroll a few feet along the cobblestone sidewalk, trying to pinpoint the architecture of the downtown buildings and enjoying the green of the trees. Down the block, I catch figures dressed in black leaving through the front door of a church, the last one locking the door behind him.
A few shops down, the barber’s pole was still turning, but otherwise, the stillness was like a Norman Rockwell painting of some 1940s downtown. In front of me was a giant Rexall drugstore sign, and, surprisingly, it still had an “Open” sign in the window. I entered and was nearly run over by a white blur.
I heard a hurried, “Oh, excuse me.” Slowed down, I could see the blur was, in fact, a man in his late 50s wearing a white lab coat, not unlike a doctor’s, with several pens in the breast pocket. From his attire, I assumed he was the pharmacist.
Thick, black glasses rested on his hook of a nose, and his thinning red and silver hair was slicked back in a severe widow’s peak, making him look like Peter Cushing wearing Buddy Holly’s glasses. Taken by surprise, the pharmacist took a few steps back.
“Hi,” I said, trying to be as friendly as possible and maybe laying it on a bit too thick. “I was just passing through - “
“The game! I can’t miss the first pitch, don’t you know,” interrupted the Peter Cushing/Buddy Holly hybrid pharmacist. He gave me a quick once-over, probably quickly ascertaining that I wasn’t a local, and then ushered me out the door. “You should go to the game. It’s an important one.” With that last comment, he locked the pharmacy door and started briskly down the sidewalk, which turned into a flat-out sprint only a few yards down the road. He looked every bit the mad scientist.
Well, he did say something about a game and a first pitch. Sounds like baseball to me.
I walk a few paces in the general direction the now long-gone pharmacist had been heading. Mayberry has got nothing on this town. White picket fences and well-manicured lawns surround me. Everything looks brand new, but with that perfect sheen of how you remember the past being bright, shiny, and better.
The paved road curved at the top of a hill, and I saw it—the ball diamond. The salty scent of popcorn wafted in my direction. I heard the roar of a not-too-distant crowd and the sweet sound of pitch and catch.
With the left-field fence below me, I sit on the grass high above it all. It’s the perfect vantage point to see the game, and I feel like a bleacher bum, but with the softest grass I’ve ever sat on, tickling my hands. The left fielder trots towards me to play his position, and I give a casual wave. He tips his cap and turns toward home. The sunlight twinkles off the number nine on his uniform back.
From my vantage point, I can see the small bleachers overflowing with what I can only imagine is the town’s entire population. I get up to get a closer look and casually stroll along the left-field foul line fence. Instinctively, I reach out with my fingers to feel the chain link. The habit, born out of years behind chain-link fences every summer, reminds me of baseball more than the feel of a bat in my hands or the taste of the stale bubblegum they still pack in my Topps baseball cards.
A loud crack, like the firing of a gun, rings out, and the crowd reacts. I look up from my memory to see the left fielder sprinting for the fence. His glove reaches up, but the ball sails over the wall. A home run. Number nine looks dejected momentarily and then slaps his left hand in the glove and hustles back to his position.
I reach the third base dugout just in time to see the home run hitter finish his round-tripper. The dugout was a cacophony of comments and congratulations from his teammates.
“Luckiest guy on the face of the earth.”
“Teddy almost reached that ball.”
“Were ya tryin’ to go the other way, or did you just go with what ol’ Cy gave ya to hit?
I buy some Crackerjacks and glance at the scorekeeper’s table as the two gentlemen sit behind the safety of the fence right behind home plate. The scorekeeper had thinning white hair, cut straight and short. The burly guy beside him had the biggest, thickest, blackest glasses I’ve ever seen.
I step closer to the fence next to them to watch the next batter amble up to the plate. I couldn’t help but overhear them talk about the home run.
“What a shot into left. Way back, way back there,” said the scorekeeper.
“Holy Cow, Gehrig hit that one hard,” said the one with the Coke bottle glasses.
It might have been the middle of July, but I’m frozen solid. Did I hear correctly? Their voices were unmistakable but impossible. Jack Buck and Harry Caray were sitting next to me at a rickety old table doing the scorebook for a ball game in this town that time forgot.
I steal a glance over at them, and they’re fixed on the game, concentrating on the battle between batter and pitcher. I will my legs to move closer.
Jack Buck and Harry Caray are sitting right next to me.
I lean closer, taking a glance at them again. Buck’s thin face and friendly smile were all there. Caray looks my way and then steals a sip from a cup that no doubt is holding more than a soft drink. Both were chatting in their distinctive voices. Voices I’d listened to for decades. Voices that would have to be from beyond the grave.
I want to shake their hands. I want to talk baseball over a beer with them. I find my voice, and, amazingly, it doesn’t crack, “What’s the score?”
Carey, not taking his eye off the game, says, “One to nothing. Gehrig just hit a home run over left field.”
“Gehrig? Lou Gehrig?” I say it in a questioning tone, which Caray ignores.
“Ruth is due as well,” Caray tells me, and I almost drop my Crackerjacks.
I stare at the plate and see one of the most recognizable baseball players ever: Babe Ruth. The Sultan of Swat. The Bambino. The guy who built Yankee Stadium. Ruth stands there up to bat, supremely confident, calm, and self-assured. He digs his heel in the dirt and swings at the first pitch. He turned on it, and it sailed foul.
I am watching Babe Ruth at the plate. This isn’t a film clip. This isn’t that John Goodman movie. This is Babe Ruth facing some pitcher I don’t recognize. In person. I’m twenty-five feet away from someone who lived and died before I was even born.
The next pitch is a called strike, and Ruth doesn’t like it. I can hear him jawing with the plate umpire. The words are muddy, but the thick New York accent is there.
Buck stands beside me and says, “Bet you fifty bucks, he strikes out.”
I smile. I’m taking a bet with Jack Buck. “I’m not betting against Ruth.”
The pitcher fires and the ball hits the back of the catcher’s mitt, with Ruth swinging his lumber right through it. Shaking his head, he trots back to the dugout as a young Hispanic kid comes to the plate.
“The Babe hasn’t hit Cy Young’s curveball all season,” Jack Buck tells me. “I better record that K in the book before Roberto corks one.”
I find a folding chair and join Buck and Caray for the rest of the game. I steal a glance at the scorebook and see names on both teams like I’m reading the Baseball Hall of Fame roll call: Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, Pee Wee Reece, Joe DiMaggio, Dizzy Dean, Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, and more.
I talk baseball with Buck and Caray. I make eye contact with the pharmacist in the bleachers, and he gives me a slight nod as if to say, “See, I told you to come watch the game.”
The scorebook read like hieroglyphics, with symbols and numbers telling the story only a trained master of the game could decipher. After the last recorded out, the Comets beat their cross-town rivals, the Angels, five to three. The score didn’t matter.
I sat there soaking in the atmosphere as long-dead Hall of Famers played baseball for the joy of it. Grown men playing like little leaguers. After a few days, a few more games, and a few beers with the guys, I lost track of time.
I entertained the idea of calling into my newspaper with the story, but somehow, I didn’t think they’d believe me. Nowadays, as I watch some long-forgotten ballplayer round the bases and give me a knowing smile from the dugout, the disbelief falls away like a looping fly ball that found the gap.
This was home, as sure as that plate in the dirt.
Captured Ghosts is coming soon.
Be seeing you.
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