Skip to main content

Quarterlings

If you were a horse in the Northern Hemisphere, which I assume you are not, your birthday would be on January 1.  If you were a horse, and thought about it for a long time, you might realize that some one-year-old horses were 1 day old, and some were 364 days old, but that both would celebrate their first birthday together.  They would be "yearlings".  And, in another year, they would compete against each other in a race for two-year-olds, for instance.

In the Southern Hemisphere, where they have chosen to have summer when the Other Half of the world has winter, horses have their birthdays on August 1.  That isn't exactly six months apart, but it is close enough for a horse.  Most horses never figure that out.

And that is why people who are not horses, but only partial horses, work so hard to get their kids into the first grade as soon as possible:  they love handicapping their colts and fillies.

The Tucson Old Timers--the Oldest Ball Club in the World, not because they have been playing baseball longer than anyone else, but because Floyd is 88, and everyone else is close behind, have their birthdays on one of four days a year.  Everyone born in October, November, or December, celebrates his birthday in November.  (You can figure it out:  January, February, and March celebrate in. . . .  Right:  you got it!)

It is an ambiguous celebration.  The kids who just turned sixty, and who were just admitted to the TOTs, try to stand tall and congratulate the elder TOTs, but they are really thinking about how the old guys cannot throw from deep short, anymore, and that they run like ducks with titanium and silicone hips.  The old guys are hopping up and down about a quarter of an inch, as happy as kids in a wading pool, because they are still able to subtract 1931 from 2013, in November or February or May or August.

Sixty or Eighty, they were yearlings together, and now they are lined up--half in Blue and half in White--to run the race that is set before them.

Before every game, they gather outside a shared dugout--because they were all yearlings, or quarterlings, together--to rehearse what they need to know together, and to hear how Art and Mal and the guys who had shoulder or elbow surgery are doing.

Baseball is all about teamwork; being together.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more