SPORTS!

My father was a decorated athlete for a brief period of his life, and like many men his vintage, he wanted his eldest son to be one as well.

That is why, during my early school years, I was arbitrarily enrolled in a new sport at the start of every grade. Each year began with a fresh activity and ended with a full introspective account of the embarrassments I endured and the numerous disappointments I served my father.

The sport of choice for third grade was baseball. Before being enrolled, I had never even touched a bat. My dad, much more excited than I, bought me the full kit: a used mitt, a second-hand bat, and some balls. He then commanded me to join him in the backyard for “practice time.” I suppose I did a decent job; next day my father didn’t feel the need to storm the coach’s office to beg for my removal.

I enrolled late into the season. I know this because that Saturday I set foot on the field—for the first time in my life—I did so without a uniform and with only twenty minutes of prior training with dad. My teammates looked professional. Assigned the New York Yankees uniform, they wore iconic white and navy blue stripes that shone like fresh snow under the morning sun.

I was wearing olive green pants and a gray hoodie.

The coach, a seemingly intuitive man, took one look at me and deduced that I could hardly distinguish between a bat and a mitt, and that I was dying of terror.

“Right field,” he said, pointing to a far corner of the park.

In case you don’t speak “the base-ball”, right field is where the least action happens. Most batters hit right-handed, sending the ball to the left. Balls would only come to me if there was a left-handed batter on the opposing team, or if there was a glitch in the Matrix and the bat hit the ball at the EXACT spot to send it towards my side.

And not to spoil the story for you, but if you’re listening to this, it’s because one of those two fucking things was exactly what happened.

I walked the long trek to practically another country to wait for the two hours of the game to pass without me having to intervene whatsoever. I was there, shifting my body weight between my two legs while my nylon pants made that “FFFT! FFFT!” sound, when I saw the opposing team get into position.

They wore the Tampa Bay Rays uniform. Deep purple shirts with dark gray pants. If our team looked like an elegant albino vixen, they looked like that purple mascot from Mcdonald’s–– menacing, I mean. And the cherry on top of this horror sundae: they were the fourth graders. The bigger, stronger, faster, fourth graders.

The whole scene was too overwhelming for this 8-year-old.

My father? Safe over by the stands, eating some fried pork rinds with Valentina sauce at nine AM. So, perhaps not that safe actually.

For most of the game, I just had to stand on the grass, something I have always been good at. The intense part happened on our turn to bat, when I furtively had to keep telling every kid behind me in line, “Oh, you can go before me,” until our turn was over.

That’s how I passed the time, and I don’t know if it was the mental numbness–because it definitely wasn’t because I was having a great time–but suddenly I realized we were already in the last round. And the Rays were batting.

The mood was tense. As my dad tried to explain on the car ride back home, we were leading by one point. We needed one more “out” to win; a home run for the Rays would mean defeat.

Clearly, all this I semi-understood right up until a couple of minutes ago, when I Googled “How to play baseball” to write this story. On that Saturday in question, I was standing obliviously in my peaceful right field, about 350km from where all the action and excitement was happening, skinny and sun-burnt like a human Slim Jim from all the exposure I was soaking.

Suddenly, a batter with a precocious mustache appeared. This creature went to the plate and hit the ball as if it was the crotch of his absent father.

I watched as the ball rose through the air like a rocket—heading towards me.

I had roughly three seconds to calculate the trajectory of my entire future. My eyes followed the ball like a predator: Velocity, weight, curvature, differential equations, air resistance, and the Coriolis effect. I was teetering on the fine line between glory and total catastrophe.

And finally, when the ball was a few meters above me, I decided to take the best possible strategy: I closed my eyes, stretched out my left arm, and prayed for the best.

THUNK!

The physical and emotional stress of the previous seconds had left me disoriented. My vision was blurry, and in my ears there was silence with a slight, sharp tone.

Gradually, I regained my senses. A steady echo came from my team’s dugout. 

When I finally opened my eyes, I could see blurry white patches running towards me. There was a slight weight shift in my hand, and when I turned to see it, my eyes finally focused: a steaming ball resting inside my mitt.

I didn’t even have half a second to examine it because I was violently rammed by a group of children dressed in white. Then I finally was able to translate the steady echo from a second ago: “BE-TO! BE-TO! BE-TO!” They yelled as they ruffled my hair and patted me on the torso amicably.

I felt on top of the world. I was living in my own Hallmark movie. The game had finished, and my actions had made the team win, my team—The Yankees of the Cristobal Colon Primary School.

Through the chaos, I glimpsed the stands. My dad had gotten up so fast from his seat that his pork rinds were spread all over; he was clapping like never before. Had I been closer, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a couple of tears running down his face. 

After three years of insatiable searching, we finally found a sport in which I excelled at.

…

Unfortunately, my delusions of grandeur betrayed us. My teammates quickly forgot that game in which I had been the star when, the following Saturday, I failed to catch a ball that caused an opposing team’s home run. Never again in the entire school year did I catch another ball, and much less hit one. After all, baseball wasn’t my thing either.

And my dad? Despite my excellent debut, after a couple of months, opted to just drop me off at the entrance to the baseball park, and pick me up after the game. The following year, when I decided to try basketball, I don’t remember seeing him at any event.

I don’t blame him. It must be painfully uncomfortable to watch your kid constantly suck at sports. Four years into the failed experiment to have an athletic son would defeat even the most willing.

This is not a childhood trauma or a deep scar in our relationship, though. Years later, he was able to find some solace by cheering on my creative endeavours.

Anyway, I was not born for competitive sports. But while those four years of me dipping my toes in them were incredibly anxiety-inducing and humiliating, I now think they are worth it just for the memory of that cold Saturday morning, when for a brief moment in time, my dad and I were able to share the same passion.