Editor’s Note: We welcome back Radio Free New Hampshire. Michael Davidow took a few months off from his column to finish his latest novel “Interdiction” about a veteran cop in a small New Hampshire town who shoots and kills a college student in a traffic stop gone awry. The ensuing investigation presents a tale of drug dealing, gunplay, and justifiable homicide. The lawyers are in control. The police are waiting and watching. The sole civilian witness to this killing is under indictment herself and silent regarding what she saw. The state’s most powerful politicians line up behind their officer. Only one thing stands between him and exoneration: another cop from another small town who begins to question what happened that night. His past has called him to his own separate truth.” It is awesome and available on Amazon.
By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Baseball games can last a long time but just as often they can end in a hurry. Little League games in particular last six innings and the spectators rarely know the score. Parents watch to make sure their kids are doing okay. We pay attention here and there. After a while, after we meet other parents and figure out whose kid belongs where, we keep our eye on those kids too. But we still don’t follow the score. You always have to ask around or bother a coach to find out.
My son played in a tournament game the other day, though, the winners were due to get trophies, and the teams themselves seemed keenly aware of it. So all the moms and dads took care to follow more closely.
Our team was leading the entire way, but the score stayed close. We also qualified as the visiting team, so the other side batted last. Our pitcher was nearing his limit by the bottom of the sixth. He was holding on from sheer will power (and as the father of a pitcher, I felt for his dad). The opposition scored two runs. The momentum began to swing.
A runner stood on third base with only one out. The batter hit a sinking line drive to first base and it looked like a sure double. The runner on third broke for home. But the first baseman made a shoestring catch and threw a bead across the diamond. Double play. End of game. The parents all cheered and the kids did too. The first baseman got mobbed.
Games can end in a hurry. One pitch, one hit, one catch, one throw; those four separate events happened in a blink and it felt unreal. There is no instant replay on a Little League field. If you miss it, it’s gone. But time plays tricks when things happen fast. Your mind sticks in place and won’t cede the moment. You don’t replay what happened visually. You simply still feel the same sensations, as emotions linger and memories refuse to settle. For a big trauma, like a death in the family, you can enter that haze and stay for a while. For a small trauma, like the end of a baseball game, it’s quicker and less pronounced. But it’s the same thing. Time breaks down.
We spectators were allowed onto the field as our kids lined up to get their prizes. Speeches were made and names were called out. My wife took pictures. Our son already looked bored, but that was a mistaken impression. He was happy as a lark and he stayed that way all day.
Even in a Little League game, the playing field becomes an abstraction from any distance at all. You might be watching from ten feet away, but that area remains a separate space that exists in a different reality. Yet as I entered and walked around a bit, the grass was real grass and the chalk was real chalk. The basepaths still held cleat marks that were fragile and fresh and obvious. The distance from base to base was no longer a mere number. It was a physical fact, yards of dry dirt that required effort to negotiate. Most of all, though, this field still echoed with the spirits of the teams that had just been playing. It radiated the heat of kids running as fast as they can, throwing with all their might, and catching baseballs whipped so hard they make your hands sting.
Little League baseball is a flawed proposition. An emphasis on winning at every level harms the kids who are still learning the game and still developing their bodies; it casts out the ones who might be great in five more years but can’t quite manage in the moment. The ubiquity of travel teams lends the whole sport a pay-to-play mentality that punishes parents either unable or unwilling to indulge the fantasies of their kids. Even professional ball looks different from how it’s been in the past. Teams are businesses chasing dollars and their employees embody that ethic. Games aren’t as fun to watch as they used to be. The skills are both higher and more generic; the players more professional and less interesting.
Yet the rationale behind the whole thing is proof against over-complication. It deals in both happiness and sadness, because our kids get hurt as often as they succeed; it deals with the framework of our world, the sun and the dirt and the grass; it deals with things that never change, but they shimmer and they shine. Our kids deserve to touch the truth. Even if only for a minute.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.