Baseball Tryouts

      This is a post dedicated to anybody who has tried to hold a wooden bat on a cold spring day. These events usually occurred during the tryouts for a "Major League" team in whatever league you were old enough to participate in. These memories I recall were long before today's ubiquitous use of batting gloves. During these contests which pitted boy versus the baseball, it didn't matter how much dirt we rubbed on our hands, the first contact between bat and ball in the early spring would leave your hands vibrating for a few minutes at least. Nothing could be done except to wait for the sting to go away. A second swing was usually ill-advised, unless someone had corrected the flaw in your first stroke or the next pitch was lobbed in ever so gently. There usually wasn't much time to consider the merits of taking a second swing, and to excuse yourself from taking a second swing would leave you looking weak in the eyes of prospective coaches. This sort of caution might even end your tryout early and would mean a year in the minors. 

      To most people, a year in the minors was the lessor of two evils, especially if you had received an unusually severe sting on your first misguided swing at the plate. Fielding balls at these tryouts in this early Spring weather was no picnic either. A bad hop grounder off your chest when one wasn't expecting it left more than one person I saw gasping for breath and writhing on the ground. There wasn't much we could do in those days as the fields were not quite as well manicured or drained as they are today in Ridgewood. We would usually just help the injured party off the field and continue our attempts to impress the onlookers with our rusty Baseball skills. You see, Baseball in my youth was one of those games which had to be played and practiced outside. Today there are indoor batting cages, at least at the High School level, where one can be reminded of the feel of a bat on ball long before the requisite first Spring tryouts. This is all not to say we didn't have some fun at these tryouts. If you made it through the first round of batting practice you were set for any other obstacles which might come your way, like shagging fly balls in a muddy outfield. These quagmires were loving called "creek mud" and one fellow actually acquired that as his nickname after one hilarious incident when he dared to try and catch a fly ball hit directly into the center of one of these soft miry lands. Nobody remembers if he caught the ball or not because the name stuck, just like the mud he come up covered in from head to toe.