Choosing Sides

I stink at baseball. I was often the last kid picked. I was so bad that sometimes I was chosen after the game was over. Choosing sides was one of the fun rights of passage in middle school. The purpose was to divide up the kids into teams. The results were more an overt acknowledgement of who were the best and who were the worst players.

I was so bad that when choosing sides, I was left with the non athletic kids. Kids who were short, overweight, the kids who not only couldn't hit, they couldn't run or throw either. The hardest thing in sports is hitting a baseball with a bat. A good, professional baseball player can't even do it half the time. So there is plenty of room for people like me who can't keep their eye on the ball.

We played baseball in a vacant sandlot that doubled as our ballfield during classroom breaks. Normally, recess was held in a paved parking lot. Somewhere buried in the ecumenical counsel of Vatican II, it was decreed that a grassy field and a play set were unnecessary for Catholic education. Always concerned with scratch, they knew it was more cost effective just to stock up on Band-Aids than to spring for monkey bars, a slide and grass.

 

I had a few friends in middle school. They were all good baseball players. While I could name most of the elements on the periodic table, they could name every team member, their number and position on the Boston Red Sox. When it came to choosing sides their friendship didn't run as deep as their desire to win. So I endured the embarrassment of being picked near the bottom of the pack until one day it happened.

For whatever reason, this time when we were choosing sides, I was picked dead last. I was selected after a kid with a broken arm. Now back in the day we made fun of each other all the time. We called it "busting," short for "ball busting." I may have been lousy at baseball, but I was very good at busting. Being sharp with the tongue was just another survival tactic in the dog eat dog middle schools of the 1970's. It's not a skill that would work today with all the anti bullying agendas. No kid in middle school wants to be the butt of a joke so I used that to my advantage. Being ridiculed could be as bad as a beating so back in the day we unconsciously bartered for our own survival. You won't hit me in the head, and I wouldn't make the class laugh at your big nose.

The two team captains choosing sides on this day were, best I could tell, evening up the score which is how I ended up on the bottom. One kid, Kevin, liked the same girl as me. She hated both of us. The other team captain, Mike, thought he would try to match my middle school wit. All he could come up with was to call me a "nerd" or something lame like that. Mike had a big nose, and I said that when he looked up someone might mistake his nose for a two car garage. He sneezed and I suggested he carry a table cloth to blow his nose. During French class we were talking about cuisine, and I asked Mike what the food smelled like in Canada.

I ended up on Kevin's team. When it was my turn at bat, Mike playing center field instructed the outfield to move in to further humiliate me. I always wanted to feel what it was like to solidly hit a baseball, but usually I struck out. Given the four embarrassing years of middle school, it was bound to happen. I swung at anything, and today my bat accidentally got in the way of the ball which sailed right down the middle towards Mike who reached upwards. I can still see the white blur of the baseball lift over Mike's glove just out of reach. Had he not moved so far in, it would've been an easy catch. I touched first base for the first time in my life. That's as far as I would go as the next fly ball was caught for the third out.

By eighth grade, my last year under the control of the Nuns of Eastwick the sandlot was invaded by a construction crew hired to build a nursing home. I was thankful that we didn't have any place to play baseball anymore. Instead, we played dodge ball in the parking lot with an overinflated soccer ball that damn near knocked out your teeth if you got hit in the face. I was picked pretty early because for some reason I was good at line driving that ball at an opponent's head.

My son, Aidan, experienced his share of middle school vitriol. Luckily, it was far less than what was endured in my day. Aidan said that the criteria for choosing sides was to select all your friends first. It makes sense because we taught our kids not to care about winning. Maybe that's why so many of them toil away for four years in college to earn a degree that can't land them a paying job.

Say what you want about his generation. At least they know how to be a good friend.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on March 2, 2017.