Long before there was such a thing as Calvin Ball(R), and when there just wasn’t a nice enough day for curb-ball, my brother and I played baseball in the basement of our house, using a ping-pong ball and ping-pong paddle.
Of course, curb-ball was limited not only to nice days, but summer vacation. In it, we would use a rubber ball and the curb in front of our house. One person would be the batter and the fielder would position themselves across the street. The batter would bounce the ball against the curb, in an effort to get it past the fielder. We had scoring setup for all different scenarios, angles, where it landed, whether or not we caught it and even had little scorecards designed by yours truly.
However, to waste the hours of the fall, winter and long early spring that dominated the skies of Allen Park, Michigan, we played baseball in the confines of our home. The entire basement was forty feet long by twenty feet wide. At the bottom of the stairs leading down from the kitchen, to our immediate right, was the laundry area. It took up a small ten foot by ten foot area that consisted of a washer, dryer, two ironing boards and lots of hanger space. Eventually, our father built some closets to house some of the clothes we weren’t wearing during whatever season it was.
Beside that area, also on the right side, was our father’s workshop area. He was always driving us places, looking for rocks or boards. We had a large rock garden on the front lawn. It included sixteen railroad ties, which bordered the entire garden. There were a few cacti, some dry-bed flowers and the rest was rocks of varying sizes, shapes and colors. Dad would be driving home from a bowling night, or giving a sermon to some of the poorer of our neighborhood. He’d spy a rock in the headlights, and simply would have to stop and grab that stone.
One time, while he had a brick-red Cadillac, he spotted a particularly iridescent rock that he thought would look perfect at the front of the garden. He hauled it into his trunk and drove home. In the morning, after he remembered the thing, he went out to the trunk, opened it up and discovered he couldn’t lift the thing out! He enlisted the help of his two sons, Mr. Maximovic and Mr. Gillum, our across-the-street neighbors. With ropes, boards and a lot of grunting, we got that darned rock out. All the while, the neighbors were wondering how in the heck he had gotten the rock picked up in the first place, let alone plopped into his trunk. Later, he would admit during retelling that he must have been drunk at the time. Horrors! A drunk minister?
Anyway, one day, we were all driving along in the countryside of nowhere-Michigan, when he spotted a broken-down barn in the middle of an unused field. He pulled the car to the side of the road and strode into the field, his two young sons frolicking along behind him. His wife, our mother, decided to stay in the car for this little jaunt. We brought back board after board of beaten-up and weathered barn, eventually stuffing the boards into the trunk and using twine to fasten the lid down so the wood wouldn’t spill out.
Around the spot where Dad kept his main thrill in life - his upright jigsaw complete with safety boards and goggles - he built his own little barn. The boards we’d stolen from that field in broad daylight became the foundation for his own little home away from home. Inside those walls, he could build whatever his heart desired. I really don’t recall anything he did build, but that doesn’t really matter, does it? The door couldn’t just be another board. Oh no. It was custom-made by someone other than him though. It was just like those swing-doors you always saw in the western movies that were the main entrance to any saloon that dotted the wild west. Yes, we had saloon doors, barn wood walls and our own little (large) jigsaw puzzle maker in the basement.
Since my father was always a Methodist minister when we were growing up - and mom was always an elementary-school teacher - there was always someone home. One of my father’s greatest passions was writing. He used to have a smallish desk that had myriad drawers from pencil-sized to file-cabinet-sized designed to hold everything from erasers to old typewriters. In fact, his prized possession during most of my life was an old typewriter, black and difficult to use, unless you sat perfectly upright directly in front of it - and you had big strong hands that could effectively punch those keys hard enough to strike the paper held in the roller.
Very soon after we moved in to the house, my father brought home a very large purchase: a pool table. He’d always wanted one and look - here it was! We had to take the entire thing apart though. And when we got one section to the bottom of the stairs and turned to the right...it wouldn’t fit through the door! So we had to remove the door frame, the overhead tiles, everything, just to get it into the basement. As I remember it now, I think there was enough of that barn left over to panel the far left wall of the basement. Hanging from that wall, in the far corner, was a stuffed deer head, a strong eight-point buck, which overlooked the pool table.
Now, in the left corner as one peered at it from the bottom of the steps, was our little play area. My brother and I had a small record player, long before something was called a “stereo”. It had a top that opened on hinges and we’d play one of our fifteen records on it whenever it was raining outside. We had The Chipmunks, The Partridge Family and The Cowsills, I recall. We also had a fold-up ping-pong table. It was our happiest possession growing up in that house.
My brother is twenty months older than I am. After we tired of ping-pong, we invented our own version of baseball. First, the ping-pong table had to be folded up, rolled over to the laundry-room side of the basement and most breakables covered or shoved into the drawers of our father’s desk. There was a ten-foot by ten-foot rug on the floor in some kind of Oriental pattern. We also had a rug that was basically one spiral of thick cord material wound round and round, that we’d push under the pool table, to give us plenty of room.
I recall the first few games where we’d pretend there was a strike zone. Then my brother got our father’s permission to use white chalk on his precious barn board to make the actual strike zone. For us, it was about eighteen inches off the floor, as wide as a standard-sized baseball home plate and as tall as the ‘letters’ of our ‘uniforms’. Of course, we didn’t have real uniforms, but we both knew where the letters were. Growing up just outside of Detroit, we loved, even lived and died with, the Tigers. But we also had National League teams we loved. My friend Todd Gillum, who was one year younger and lived directly across the street, loved the Cincinnati Reds.
My brother Joel was an L.A. Dodger fan. That left me rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates. If there had been a team way back then with purple in their uniform, I’d have chosen them. But black-and-yellow was the farthest thing from Dodger Blue I could get. We’d attend baseball games at old Tiger Stadium at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. With money we’d earned through chores and weekly allowances, we’d each purchased our own ‘batting helmet’ which was basically just made out of breakable plastic. But back then, we didn’t know better.
I was always the scorekeeper. Once I learned how to do it correctly, nobody else could ever tell me I was doing it wrong. My brother and I started fantasy baseball way back then, without even realizing that what we were doing would become a national phenomenon. We’d have our own little draft of players from around both leagues and create our own teams. Neither of us could be the Tigers, of course, because to allow one brother to be the favorite team, would only upset the other brother.
So Joel’s Dodgers might have one or two actual Dodger players on it, but usually had whoever else he wanted. My Pirates team had more American League players on it than Nationals. We’d draft based on a huge list of players we all followed. I had Roberto Clemente one year and he had Hank Aaron. It wasn’t as if these were our actual players and we’d use their game-by-game stats from actual games played. In fact, during the winter, we’d have no actual statistics to use. No, we’d assemble our team and I’d write up the scorecards for each team, for each game we’d play in the basement.
My brother stood as far away as he could, which was about twenty feet, and he’d practice throwing the ping-pong ball at the target - our chalk outline of the strike zone. He’d throw while I drew up the scorecard, complete with columns for each inning, and the totals at the end - runs, hits, errors. When I was ready, he’d let me bat first. As I recall even now, my brother had a wicked curve. It would come right at my head and I’d duck out of the way. But he’d throw it hard enough to leave a little mark on the wall and we could both see he’d hit the strike zone.
“Strike one,” he’d call out with glee. I would dig in and grit my teeth, anxious for the next pitch. The orange rubber side of the ping-pong paddle was my favorite. My brother preferred the red, smooth side of the paddle. Maybe he did it just to be different, I don’t know. We were great competitors even in our youth. But being only twenty months apart in age gave us a lot of closeness in our formative years. My brother’s curve ball was more like what they call a slider these days. It felt like a fastball, especially when I’d stand in there and “take one for the team”. But when it dipped down into or just out of the strike zone and I’d swing at it, it truly curved.
Here’s a typical game. I’m batting, right-handed usually for the right-handers in my lineup and I’d switch to back-handed for the left-handed batters. If I got my ‘bat’ on the ball, and it stayed within the foul lines, we’d assess whether or not it would have been fielded by one of his players. Eventually, we’d put down bright yellow masking tape to mark the foul lines. My brother even added a bit of tape out there at the twenty-foot mark for the pitcher’s “rubber”. I recall having tile ceiling with fluorescent light tubes interspersed throughout the basement, lighting the entire place.
If I got the ball past him, it would be considered anything from a double to a home-run, depending on where it had gone. Also, we were required to “run the bases” which we decided based on marks around the basement. The record-player was first-base. The ping-pong table behind the pitcher’s mound was second-base. The pool table was third-base. If I got to second before my brother retrieved the ball, I’d get to say Roberto was on second, as Brooks Robinson was up to bat. He’d even intentionally walk some of my sluggers, to setup a double-play combination. If I were to hit a ground-ball directly to him, he would call out “double-play” and both my runners would be out, possibly ending the inning.
I think the best home-runs were those where we lost the ping-pong ball! But we always had a spare. If he could field where I’d hit it, it would be an out. Most of the outs on my side of the game were strikeouts. Most of his were bouncers that would hit me in the gut or hands. The sound of the ball striking the wood behind the batter would give our mother fits upstairs. But she let us play, day after day, without once complaining of the sound. We ran the bases, switched sides for batting and pitching and in-between each at-bat, I’d go to the scorebook and write down what had happened.
When it was my turn to pitch, I was allowed to move up closer, because I wasn’t that consistent with getting it to the plate, let alone over it! I had my own wicked curve ball. I learned how to throw from my brother’s teachings. All you have to do is snap your wrist and the thing breaks about a foot down if you throw it overhand. Of course, I couldn’t throw nearly as hard as my brother, so he’d be hitting just about anything I pitched. But he was an erratic batter, so not a lot of his hits were in-play.
Sometimes, we’d hear our mother turn up the television louder, or the piano would get a little more adamant in its key-strokes. She’d be my father’s accompaniment at church on Sundays, until he finally got a qualified organist to take over one year. A ballgame would typically end our day. But there were the rare days when we’d take the entire afternoon and play a doubleheader. I think we played pong-ball more often than actual ping-pong. As far as I can recall, we never broke one lamp, one lightbulb or any of my parents’ collection of antique red glass bowls.
...thanks to my brother Greg for writing this
"how your soul learns... blessed and burned in the fire of your life!"
