THEY WANT YOU TO FORGET CORONAMANIA

From ages 8-15, I played in my hometown’s, Oakland, New Jersey’s Recreation baseball leagues. Rec Baseball was a big deal in kid-heavy 1960-70s Oakland. The games — especially in the 10-12-year-old Majors — were palpably competitive and enthusiastically attended by parents and peers. Boys that age had good coordination—we had to qualify, via try-outs, for Majors—and we hadn’t yet turned our attention to girls. Or at least didn’t acknowledge doing so.

Our emotions were bound up in how well we played and whether our teams won. Five-plus decades later, I can still tell you the names and hat/sox colors of all ten teams, which team a given kid played for and roughly how good each team and kid were.

Entering my 12-year-old season, I thought we, the Pirates, had one of the better teams. But we lost our Saturday afternoon opening day game against the Cardinals. Facing one of the league’s best pitchers—he was big, had a unique delivery, threw fast and his ball tailed in on righties—we got only one hit and he struck out 15, including me, twice. If you’re only as good as your last game, we—and I—weren’t good.

Our next scheduled game was against the Yankees, who had a bunch of good athletes and had won their first game. One of the Yankees, Billy, was in my sixth-grade class. In the days leading up to the game, Billy razzed me about how badly his team was going to beat us. I thought we’d compete but, humbled by our bad start just said, “Yeah, we’ll see.”