Batter Up

A warm summer's afternoon and the sun was starting to go down, setting the sky on fire. My cousins and I decide to go to the nearby playground by my house. It wasn't that great of a place, just a little parking lot behind a school with a jungle gym and white, worn out lines forming a baseball diamond. We arrive at the park to find that we are the only ones there. Perfect. Nothing to distract us. Nothing to get in our way. There is only four of us, so we split the teams evenly, two versus two. We play rock paper scissors to see who would bat first. 1, 2, 3, shoot. My hand formed a fist, my cousin’s was flat and open. We went to the field. They went up to bat.

The way we play is a bit unusual. You hit the ball. Run to first. You are safe. But then you go back to the batting line. You now have an imaginary player on first who has taken your place. If you hit the ball again and get to first again, you now have a player on first and second base. As you can probably tell, playing this way had a lot of flaws leading to conflicts, but we had to make do with what we had. We would argue if the imaginary player made it to second safe or not. A lot of the time, we would just play rock paper scissor to settle these things.

Well anyways, we play for quite some time. They get some good hits, we get some, but we never really kept score, we just kept on playing. By the time the sun was halfway set, it was our turn to bat. My cousin and I get one good hit each and now we have an imaginary player on first and second base. My cousin is quite an interesting person. He is two years older than I am, but he is shorter than me and also weaker. But despite that, he is the most athletic person I know, very optimistic, and never gives up. To him, losing was not an option. So when he walks up to bat, the other team doesn't expect too much from him, maybe a single or a double, nothing much. He walks up to bat and gets into position. The ball is thrown and it sails through the air. Swing. Whiff. Strike one.

"That's ok," I yell to him, “You’ll get this next one."

You can see his determination. Sweat drips from his face and drenches his t-shirt. He gets into position again. He stares down the pitcher. The ball is pitched once again. Swing. WHAP! CRRRACK! The ball goes flying into the open air, far into the outfield, but that’s not what startles us. My cousin is still standing at home. He stares blankly into his hands. There, he holds the lower half of the bat. We look down into the infield. The other half is somewhere between the pitcher and first base. We are all silent at first just staring dumbfounded at my cousin. Our jaws hang open and we all look like complete idiots. Then, we all burst into a roaring laughter. Sure, my bat is broken, but that was just amazing. We decided that my team had one just because of that beautiful hit. He hang out by the jungle gym for a bit afterwards, we play some catch with the ball. When the sun was barely visible, we all decide to go back to my house. We tell the story to my parents and they laugh so hard that it hurts their stomachs.

To this day, I still have that bat with the handle duct taped together to the barrel of the bat, as a memoir of the glorious and hilarious day.