Baseball and Life

by Sandy Hingston
http://www.more.com/2051/18014-safe-at-home

Every Saturday our father took us into the yard and taught us how to bunt. Not how to hit a homer or a line drive. Just bunt. Forty-five years later, I finally understand why.

I’m standing on the scrubby grass of our backyard, years ago, behind the cramped ranch-style house where I live with my mom, dad, two sisters, one brother and my mom’s dad, who sleeps in my little sister’s room. My father’s arms are around me. His hands are covering my hands, gently pushing them upward on my brother’s sturdy Louisville Slugger. The bat is made of wood. They were all made of wood back then—maple, maybe, or ash. Wood that’s golden and smooth, with thin lines running through it like the veins on my wrists.

“You’ve got to choke up,” Dad tells me. “The bunt is all about control.”

My sisters are playing on the swing set. My brother is mowing the front lawn. They don’t pay any attention to Dad and me. My little sister’s still too young, and my big brother and sister have already been through this, have held the bat and stood with Dad behind them, his hands over theirs, demonstrating the jerk of the bat that will cause a baseball to drop precipitously to the ground, then roll a yard or two toward the pitcher, or first base, or third. A bunt, Dad says, is a thing of beauty. A bunt is opportunity.

A bunt is also hard. I’m fairly small, and the bat is unwieldy. Choking up feels unnatural; why would they make the thing so long if you’re supposed to hold it way up above the knob? Besides, what’s fun in baseball is swinging away, whipping that baby off your shoulder and lining a drive between the shortstop and third or, even better, whaling a fly ball out beyond the blueberry bushes that mark the end of our yard, not that I’ve ever done that. But Dad doesn’t teach us to hit—not any of us, even my brother. He only teaches us to bunt.

“Remember: control,” Dad says, and drops his hands from mine, coming around to pitch.

I don’t mind. It’s time with Dad, one on one, which is something all of us get precious little of. I want to please him, do it right, make him proud of me. I’m only six years old; I don’t understand baseball or my father.

I never asked him why he taught us how to bunt rather than hit home runs. We didn’t question parents the way kids do now, because if we did, we got our behinds dusted. Maybe he focused exclusively on bunting because we couldn’t hit away in the backyard of that little house; we would have taken out our windows, not to mention those of the neighbors.

A bunt is sacrifice. Chances are they’ll call you out, but your teammate will prosper. A bunt is a means to an end. It’s thinking ahead—it pays off in the future instead of right now. It keeps the game going. It is the antidote to selfishness.

I cannot remember the last time I held a baseball bat. But I’m still bunting, every day. When life seems overwhelming, I think about my dad, with four small kids and a wife and father-in-law all under one roof, working two jobs, and everybody needing new shoes, and our aqua-blue Plymouth station wagon that was just about gasping its last.

My siblings and I haven’t grown up to be long-ball hitters. None of us have changed the world. In the past few years, we’ve lost jobs, lost our savings, lost our confidence, lost our faith. Lost Dad. But thanks to him, we’re masters at making do, stretching things out, getting the most from what opportunity offers. At keeping it going with nothing more than grit in our hearts and our grip on the bat. That’s what he really had us working on in the backyard.

Sandy Hingston is a senior editor at Philadelphia magazine.
Originally published in the June 2010 issue of More.