Watching Jack McDowell flip the bird to a boorish, howling mob at Yankee Stadium the other night made me think of my Little League days. I'll never quite grasp the "fan" mentality, whereas I found myself empathizing with Jack over his doomed plight, thousands of angry strangers screaming for his head, and in the following days, sportswriters indignantly emoting as if some great national tragedy had occurred. Please. A professional athlete lost his cool in a high-pressure situation most sportswriters couldn't even begin to comprehend. End of story. Baseball for me was a test of boyhood. It was the unfathomable shame of booting an easy grounder and the weightless swing of a perfect hit. It was a kid's game, and I haven't played it since those halcyon days of the Ashland Little League. I wholeheartedly believe that very little changes from the Little League to the Majors, that the same principles apply, only the motives change. Let me take you on a trip back to my baseball days of the mid '70's, when I loved the game so hard my friends and I would pack bag lunches and water jugs, leave for the local field at nine in the morning, play until dinner, go home for some food, then play again until the late summer darkness fell, and we had to stop because we couldn't see the ball. Riding home on those warm nights, we ruined many lucrative baseball cards between the spokes of our banana-seated, 21-inch Huffy Roadsters. None of us knew any better. Opening Day. Everyone I knew in Little League slept in his uniform the night before the first game of the season. They looked and felt a lot like pajamas anyway. And if a kid didn't clutch his baseball glove to his heart like a leather teddy bear, he hung it on one of his bed posts, with his hat on another. The following day at school was a marathon test of nerves, all the players seeing each other in the hall and giggling like loons, wearing our hats to class, until the teachers swatted us for having such poor manners. That evening, we had a parade up Main Street. The field sat in a park at the end of a steep, half-mile long hill. There were fire trucks blaring their sirens, the American Legion guiding us with their stone-faced veteran flag bearers, the high-school band blasting "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" out of key, and all us kids in our sleep-wrinkled uniforms and stirrup socks, lined up by team, marching in three rows up that hill to our destiny. Some of us whistled the theme from The Bridge Over the River Kwai as we marched. The big thing was to give each other "flats." This was done by jamming one's foot down on the back of another kid's sneaker, hopefully pulling his shoe off and causing him great embarrassment. At the field, we assembled along the white-chalk foul lines, pledged allegiance to the flag beyond left field and sang the national anthem. That would be the only time we were equal and together. Team loyalty, personal ability, hostile, vicariously-playing parents and intense childhood feuds would break that bond over the course of every season. The field seemed immense--the longest hit I ever had was a triple off the left field fence. A few years ago, I purposely drove by the field and couldn't believe how small it was. The Shoup Brothers, Eddie and Rodney. Eddie was a few years ahead of me and a good kid. I say this because he hung out with straggly-haired tough guys in Black Sabbath t-shirts with yellow teeth and fingers. He would look like that, too, in a few years, as so many of us would, but this was before the fall. I remember him well because on one key play, he chased down a line drive to deep center, only to slam into one of the wood-board advertisements lining the outfield fence--I think it was for Mrs. T's Pierogies--cracking it in half, then pinning himself underneath the chain-link fence. There was blood all over the place and a swarm of adults. An ambulance came after ten endless minutes, the fence was carefully pulled from his wounds, and they took him away, unconscious. He had dropped the ball when he hit the fence. Everyone was crying, and his parents were hysterical as they climbed into the back of the ambulance. After the fence was dragged back in place, the game went on, and his team lost. All his heroics were lost on his little brother and my team mate Rodney. We both played on Eddie's team two years later, the Phillies. There's no nice way to say this--Rodney was a loser, and he hated baseball. The last I heard, he was doing time for stealing eight-track tape players from cars in shopping mall parking lots. His attitude was such that during a game, he would sit down in right field and sometimes take his shoes off. If a ball came his way, he'd watch it roll by and yell out, "What, you want me to get that?" I don't think he liked his father too much, who worshipped Eddie and couldn't understand why he was such a malcontent. Rodney was famous for eating his glove. I don't mean digesting mouthfuls of leather. I mean gnawing on the lacings. We all did that in those long pauses that are such a part of the game, like poker players sucking on cigars as they mull their options. The leather tasted salty, and the consistency of the laces now reminds me of sesame noodles. Rodney did it so much his baseball glove was like a normal glove, with separate, unconnected fingers. Many times, his hand was too damaged to even put a glove on--he often tried to light his fingers on fire to prove how tough he was.

Taxi Slotnick. Long before I played and long after, Taxi was the official league umpire. No one knew Taxi's real name--we suspected it was simply Taxi. Some thought that was his middle name, and "Hey" was his first. He drove a cab for the Red Devil taxi service. We lived in a small working-class town in the hills of Pennsylvania; no one used taxis, and I have no idea how they stayed in business. Taxi would show up for each game during batting practice in his red military-style hat and matching shirt, a Karl Malden look-alike with cauliflower ears to match his bulbous nose. His teeth were terrible. It must have been genetic, because his 12-year-old son, Taxi Jr., had the same demented Keith Richards grin. After parking his cab, he'd saunter into one of the dugouts, strip down to his T-shirt and boxers and put on his umpire's outfit: gray pants, white socks, black shoes, dark blue chest protector and a tight-fitting navy blue jacket. He wore a polka-dot train engineer's hat and turned it backwards to put on his catcher's mask. He carried around his huge umpire's protector shield on one arm, like a knight without a sword. Taxi took guff from no man or boy. "Hey, butt" was how he addressed everyone, even women. He may have been a lowly taxi driver in real life, but he dictated those games, bawling out strikes in his hoarse croak. Taxi was only 5' 4" and limped from an old Korean War wound. His only problem was he wanted to be a coach, too, and would occasionally stop games to offer sage advice to wayward players. He once did this to my older brother Jay who was striking out batters left and right and well on his way to a win. Taxi stopped the game, told my brother his wind-up was all wrong, and actually came out to the mound to show him how it was done. Jay took his advice and got shelled for five runs before his coach took him out. He never pitched again. Larry Clews. Larry was our coach, a hard-luck factory worker in his mid-20's who lived for the game. While most coaches were there because they had a son on their team, Larry's sons were still in diapers. His wife was always pregnant. She would come to each game and cheer us on from the stands, her babies dozing in a huge stroller. In one game, an opposing coach got into an argument with Larry over a close play at the plate and called his wife a fat, ugly bitch. We could all see Larry, a much smaller man than the other coach, tensing his shoulders to attack. A few of us grabbed aluminum bats and gathered at the edge of the dugout. But Larry threw his hands up, stared at the other coach for a moment, then silently walked back into the dugout. He took his clipboard and car keys, got his wife and kids and went home with two innings left. We were getting clubbed, as usual, and finished the game while the winning coach vainly tried to avoid the withering stares of everyone in the park. Against his will and after being badgered for weeks on the issue, Larry even let us try his Elephant Butts once during practice, a few of us pulling plugs of the foul chewing tobacco from his pouch and stuffing a pinch between our cheek and gum, like in the Walt Garrison commercial. We spent the next five minutes projectile vomiting while Larry laughed himself into a stupor. He was the best coach I ever had. Down to earth, approachable, a real stickler for fundamentals, and more proud of a well-played game than a cheap win. Many times he treated all 15 of us to greasy concession-stand hamburgers and warm sodas in dixie cups after a hard-fought loss. We'd sprawl over the picnic benches with hang dog faces and watery eyes while he laughed and pointed out each of our improvements and good plays. Sometimes he even went all the way and got us those shoe-lace french fries wrapped in old newspapers. We had losing records year after year, but that was due more to the fact that a few well-connected teams had inside lines on all the best prospects, ensuring one or two perennial powerhouses tearing up the rest of the league. It was a foul system, and Larry wasn't part of the loop. Losing wasn't the worst of it. Being the head coach, Larry was expected to pitch batting practice and offer advice to hitters during the pre-game warm-up. This was always great fun. The announcer in the two-story cement bunker behind home plate would play the Top 40 station over the PA system while everyone took his turn getting easy hits and making unpressured plays on the field. We stood in groups of two or three bantering and waiting our turn at the plate. Larry had to pitch with a glove full of baseballs, throwing one after another to the batter who peppered the slowly-thrown balls all over the field. It was the summer of '75, my second year with the Phillies after playing two years in the farm system, and I was grooving to the sound of my favorite single, Paul McCartney's "Listen to What the Man Said." Even though I related more to Lennon, I've always felt closer to McCartney because we have the same birthday. "Listen" was one of his many ubiquitous summer hits, ruling AM radio for weeks. I had heard it an hour earlier on the car radio when my mother dropped me off in her Skylark station wagon. George Charlton, our power hitter, came up to bat. On the third pitch, he hit a screaming liner straight into Larry's crotch. Time stopped. One by one, the baseballs slipped from Larry's glove and hit the dirt of the mound with muffled thuds. His face was frozen between a grimace and a scream--a grotesque, silent howl. His plug of Elephant Butts slipped from his open mouth and dribbled down his white T-shirt. No one moved. Paul sang, "Soldier boy kisses girl, leaves behind a tragic world." George stood at the plate, still holding the bat as if he were reproduced in wax. Larry started to fart and moan. Oh, no, I thought, he's going to shit his pants. After breaking wind a few more times, Larry fell over. Taxi waddled out to the mound. We converged on the infield to find Larry passed out and clutching his testicles. Before we could panic, the announcer yelled down that he had already called an ambulance. Taxi got us to carry him to the dugout. He was immobile, like a stuffed bear, and his dead weight was hard to heave. It took six of us, carrying him as if we were pallbearers in a baseball-themed funeral. Paul sang, "The wonder of it all baby, yeah, yeah, yeah." A few minutes later, the ambulance crew carted him off, and we played on. Larry showed up for the end of the game, which we won for him, walking slow and eating vanilla ice cream. His face was beet red, and he wouldn't tell us anything about his condition, although we noticed for the next few weeks he wore a particularly baggy pair of Bermuda shorts and walked bow-legged.

Jimmy Reilly. Jimmy was the worst player in the league; naturally, he was on our team. Everyone knew it--his old man, the coaches, every player on every team, even himself. And he never got better. He was a well-mannered kid with a genius IQ, but he was gawky and severely uncoordinated. Jimmy tried everything possible to make himself look like a real player: red-white-and-blue wrist bands, expensive batting gloves, his own bat, Adidas turf spikes. Nothing mattered. He took mounds of verbal abuse on a daily basis over his complete lack of skill. Christ on His walk to Calvary Hill took less flack than Jimmy. Every year, he smilingly signed up and played on. Unlimited errors. Constant strike outs. Snickers. Evil childhood name-calling. He was one of those kids whose family went on vacation at least a week every month in the summer, so he floated on and off our team. Was it his father? I doubt it--the few times I met the man, he was unfailingly kind and clearly not badgering his son into the sport. It was Jimmy. He was like all of us in that he lived for baseball, no matter that he couldn't play for shit. Yet he never cried, or threw his bat in disgust, or pointed fingers after a loss. After one particularly bad at-bat that saw him benignly chop at a pitch that was practically rolled in like a bowling ball, he gently removed his batting helmet, smiled that spacey grin of his and walked back to the dugout. Halfway there, Taxi caught up with him, clutched his arm, and croaked, "Hey, butt. You're too well-adjusted for this sport." Jimmy didn't know if it was praise or an insult. He laughed at Taxi and thanked him for his valuable insight. Chatter. Spectators of major league baseball never get a feel for chatter, whether they're too far from the field or watching it on a television. Something tells me the pros aren't into chatter anyway. Chatter is more than words of encouragement, like "strike him out, Bobby" or "come on, Ace, one more out." In the Little League, chatter was a tribal art form. Our official chatter song on the field was, "He's a batter, he's no good, strike him out . . . swing!" The first three lines were elongated and tentative, timed to match the pitcher's stretch, and the word "swing" exploded like a Russian dancer crying "hey" as the pitch crossed the plate. That was the formal version. Most days, it got so damn hot and tiresome that we'd simply chant "he-ba, he-ba, he-ba, he-baaaa .... swing!" We sounded like auctioneers stuck on the same price. If we got lazy or disheartened in a blow-out inning, Larry would yell, "I can't hear anyone singing out there," and, in those half-hearted, bored sopranos, we'd pick it up again. Sometimes we'd deviate and chatter in an English accent, or in Flip Wilson's Geraldine voice. It might not have been true, but we felt that we could somehow will the batter to strike out through our chatter--this is what happened to kids raised on David Bowie. Gene Furman. Gene's dad was our assistant coach, a huge bear of a man with a crew cut. He looked like Art Carney on steroids. Gene was our best pitcher, not necessarily fast, but great control for a 12-year-old. While his dad rarely raised his voice with Gene, he stood like a sentinel in the corner of the dugout every time he pitched, cross-armed, gazing at his son. Gene cracked at least once a game. He'd purposely throw pitches in the dirt just to get a reaction out of his dad. On a good day, his dad would say, "Enough, Gene, enough," and Gene would get back in his groove. On a bad day, his dad would walk about behind the dugout and have a smoke. Every batter would get walked or hit until Larry stormed from of the dugout and took Gene out. Gene wept every time, uncontrollably, throwing his hat down and kicking dirt on it, tears streaming down his cheeks. In the Little League, it was rare for a retired pitcher to go straight to the dugout, so Gene would trade positions with his reliever and silently weep until the long inning was over. He'd come into the dugout, throw his glove at the water bucket and sulk in the far corner from his father. In our junior year of high school, Gene knocked-up one of our classmates, and they had a boy. He dropped out, married the girl and took a job working next to his dad in an envelope factory. I wonder if his son plays ball. The Moment. I'm a first baseman by trade, not fast, but good-sized and able to dig it out of the dirt. I had my moment when, with men on first and second with no outs, the batter, a big lefty with the best average in the league, hit a line shot straight at my head. It was more an act of survival than making the catch, but I snapped my glove in front of my face and fell down from the force--with the ball. The man on first was halfway to second before he knew what happened, and the man on second was touching third. I could have tagged out the man on first and trotted down to second for an unassisted triple play. But when I went to tag the man lunging back to first, I hit his back so hard the ball popped out of my glove. I scampered after the ball and had a play at second, but the man slid back in before my throw. Eighteen years later, through all those years of solid play mixed with the expected errors, missed opportunities and occasional flashes of brilliance, what I remember most clearly is the ball rolling away on that pure, green, infield grass, and feeling like it was the world slipping away from me.

That Championship Season. Losing was a way of life for the Phillies. We never lost heart, but we did reach a point where we became too pragmatic for kids, that uncharted adult territory where we came to realize it was just a game and nothing to cry over. Once we hit that point in the first half of my last season, we made a serious run for the championship. I don't know what happened. Larry said it was perfect timing between our fundamentals and an urge to win. We played no better or worse than usual. All we did was pull out the close ones. It became easy, one win after another, and we crossed the thin line between victory and defeat. We finished the first half 8-2, tied for first with the Pirates, the league leaders five years running. The previously mentioned team whose coach belittled Larry's wife was the Pirates. The league's best player, Bobby Evert, was the coach's son. There was a famous photograph of Willie "Poppa" Stargell of the Pittsburgh Pirates holding a sledgehammer like a bat, and Bobby had a picture in the local paper of himself in the same pose. He was insufferable--a great player, but already messed up in the head and on the road to nowhere. At the age of 11, he signed autographs for wide-eyed farm-system kids and referred to himself in the third person. Because of the tie, we had to play the Pirates. They had beaten us 10-0 the first game of the season with Bobby pitching, but three weeks into the summer, Bobby got a bad cut on his leg riding his mini-bike and missed two games. The Pirates lost both, and we blew them out one of those games. Now that they had Bobby back, it was expected they'd take revenge on the Cinderella-kid Phillies. It was the greatest game I ever played in. The crowd ringed the fences, putting out lawn chairs and cheering from the hoods of pick-up trucks. It had rained earlier that day, and a hazy rainbow shimmered over the left field fence. Gene pitched the game of his life, striking out two batters an inning and throwing a lot of easy grounder pitches--low and away in the corner. We had no errors--a first and last. But Bobby was throwing pills that day. We didn't have speed guns back then, but he easily had to be pitching around 75 m.p.h., blazing speed for 12-year-olds. Speed like that was frightening--Bobby piled up strike outs because most batters stood shaking on the far edge of the box. Larry told us to stick our bats out and let the pitch hit it. I got two singles to right center like that, and we managed to nickel-and-dime two runs this way, occasional walks and bloop singles. But the Pirates came back, putting across one run in each of the last three innings, and we pulled up short. Larry wept in happiness after the game. He called it the greatest moment of his life and bought us newspaper fries and pizza to prove it. Taxi came by and said, "Hey, butts, youse got heart, all of youse." He was crying too, and he smelled like stale cigarettes and alcohol. We looked at each other and knew something great had happened, but no one wanted to admit it. The second half of the season, we went 5-5 and watched Bobby and his father hold the league trophy over their heads in the back of a cherry red Sedan driving around the warning track. Summer's End. In that last year, the Bicentennial, my hair was growing longer, and my record collection was getting larger. I had started earlier that year by buying my first album, Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," for $4.99 at Woolworth's, with my snow shoveling money and smuggling it home under my heavy Woolrich coat. Our father was down on rock and roll because my older brother Marty was fanatical for it, and he was having some logistic problems with parental guidance. I found myself talking about The Beatles with Jimmy Reilly all the time. We were both going through our first adolescent brush with the band and referred to the red and blue albums as if they were the Old and New Testaments. Something told me I wasn't going to be gung-ho over high-school athletics. I did manage to squeeze in a few years of basketball and golf, but my heart wasn't in it. That didn't mean I gave up sports. Neighborhood games were a way of life for all of us until our late teens; it's just that organized sports had a whole idiotic social scene mixed in with it, and being a jock didn't seem to mesh with my more artistic inclinations. So late August rolled around in that strange summer of '76. All the guys said they felt sick that school was coming around again, but we all secretly loved the idea of it after long, floating months of lawn mowing, Bicentennial Moments, and endless ball games. Our world in the summer was reduced to kids in our immediate neighborhood and fellow Little League players. School meant old friends from other towns and girls, who were making more sense all the time. We lost our last game, and after the ceremonial hand-shaking ("good game, good game, good game . . ."), we gathered in the dugout for the last time. Larry was strangely subdued, not looking at any of us. We took his cue and treated each other the same way. After a few minutes of idle banter, we took off in separate directions, finding our parents along the right field fence. My mother said she'd be glad not to have to wash my grass-stained uniform anymore, but she didn't look happy. A few of those kids on the team went to Catholic school, and I never saw them again. Most of us would end up in the same junior high school, slowly forgetting our bonds and rivalries as baseball's allure faded in our outlaw teenage world. Two years after that, I bought a new glove a few sizes too big with the idea that it would last the rest of my playing days. With a black magic marker, I scrawled my name on the outer middle and ring fingers. I put a large stone in it, tied it with clothes line and soaked it in linseed oil for two weeks. It broke in nicely in neighborhood ball that summer. I still use that glove to play softball, even though it's so old and decrepit that I had to have it re-laced twice, and a line shot will get my hand stinging and raw for minutes afterwards. I have no urge to buy a new one. Sometimes when the evening sun hits it the right way, it looks like a piece of American folk art. But I still use it too much to hang it on a wall.