It is not whether you are good at baseball: it is that you can play it at all.

If you are getting up in years, it is nearly impossible to visit a doctor and not be asked, "Have you had any falls lately?"

You find yourself calculating the cost and clumsiness of an aluminum walker, and whether your car will accommodate a chair lift.

The Tucson Old Timers, who cannot even join the team if they are not at least sixty years old, play hardball, not softball, not slow-pitch: hard-ball!

If you are old enough even to imagine what it is like to be sixty or seventy or ninety-two years old, you still cannot imagine what it is like to run from first to third base, nowhere nearly as fast as you remember having done when you were young and green. Your cardiologist would stop breathing if he or she knew what you were feeling.

If you have not picked up a baseball or a stone for years, and tried to throw it as hard as you can about a hundred feet, then you do not know what it is like to be an Old Timer playing baseball. Your arm is likely to convince you that it weights a hundred pounds and is going to fall off.

Running as fast as you can to catch a foul tip is likely to end with a nose dive into a trench of your own digging, just because something inside you stopped telling your feet what to do.

I wonder what Ron Carlson says to his doctor when asked whether he has fallen lately.

Maybe, "Have you ever played baseball? Have you ever been a catcher? Were you sixty or seventy when you did?"

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