“Garage” is an abbreviation of Garage Door Baseball, in which a batter stands in front of the garage door and a pitcher fires a tennis ball at him from the foot of the driveway. The Sundems’ garage door is mottled with ball marks, the graffiti of a thousand games of Garage. There are two kinds of moms: those who allow their garage door to be used as a backstop and those who do not.
We know from Twins games on TV what Harmon Killebrew’s dad in Idaho told Harmon’s mom when she complained about their lawn being ruined by ball games: “We can raise grass or we can raise boys.” The Killebrews chose to raise boys, not grass, and the Sundems and Rushins have made the same choice.
In Kevin’s driveway, I swing a bat acquired at Bat Day at the Met, where the Twins hand out wooden weapons to the first ten thousand children to pass through the turnstiles, and we children in turn wave them in unison like windblown wheat and bang them on the concrete beneath our feet to conjure thunder in the grandstand.
Every kid in Bloomington affects the batting stance of Rod Carew. He’s black and left-handed with an Afro that spills out both sides of his batting helmet, but all of us—white, right-handed, un-Afroed—can lean back like Carew does and hold the bat handle in our hands as lightly as possible, as if cupping a live bird.
Other days, when I play stickball at McCollow’s house with the handle of a push broom, Mike and I press Buddig brand pastrami, thin as my mother’s onionskin typing paper, into our left cheeks to mirror Carew’s chaw. We have read about his belief that the bulge in his right cheek pulls the skin down ever so slightly below his right eye, the one closer to the pitcher, and helps him to see the ball better. Mike and I, we don’t want to be like Rod Carew. We want to be him.
There are certain improvised rules for the games we play in the streets and driveways and backyards and playgrounds that every one of my friends accepts as gospel. If we’re playing a baseball game with five or fewer kids on either team, Pitcher’s Hand will be in effect, and the base runner will have to stop once the ball has been returned to the pitcher. When all of a team’s batters are on base, the next man up in the order will abandon his base in favor of a ghost runner. (“Ghost runner on third!” the pitcher will call before throwing his next pitch.) In football, a defensive lineman will either count to five bananas or three Mississippis before rushing the passer. That’s it, bananas or Mississippis. There is no other pass-rushing currency, and the exchange rate is fixed: one Mississippi equals 1.666 bananas. The team that is scored against in backyard football has to walk to the other end of the field to receive the ensuing kickoff, a rule handed down through generations and known as Sucker’s Walk. In some games do-overs are accepted, while others adhere to a strict code of no do-overs.
In South Brook, Kevin and I are the only ones who play Garage. The rules and customs are too complex to recite to any other kids in the neighborhood. A hit that bounces in the driveway is an out. A ball that one-hops in the street is a single. Any drive that carries the street and lands in Karl Johnson’s yard is a double. We call Karl the K-Train, after the A-Train, Artis Gilmore, of the Kentucky Colonels. If a ball should carom off the Johnsons’ house, it’s a triple. And when one of us—usually Kevin—hits it squarely onto, or even over, the Johnsons’ roof, it’s a home run.
No Johnsons were consulted in these ground rules, but no Johnson has ever complained when a ball rattles their windowpanes or lands in their rain gutter and rolls into their downspout, where it stops halfway down like a marble in a windpipe.
We play for hours. The time disappears down a storm drain, along with some of our tennis balls. A right-hander pulling the ball will send it down the hill on Xerxes Circle, rolling toward the open storm drains, so we try to go opposite field. It works for Carew, who goes opposite field or up the middle—almost never pulls the ball—and he wins the batting title every year.
Occasionally we retreat to the Sundems’ kitchen, where Kevin’s mom serves Kool-Aid in Dixie Riddle Cups. Kevin reads his out loud to me.
“What’s the best way to talk to a monster?”
“I give up.”
“Long-distance.”
We admire the beaded sweat on our faces reflected in the range window, then run upstairs to Kevin’s room, where he withdraws a shoe box from under the bed: it’s full of baseball cards, sorted by team, bound by rubber bands, each bundle smelling of gum and new shoes.
More than any book or Sports section, any liner notes or album cover, any comic strip or cereal-box side panel or Sears catalogue, these baseball cards are my literature, to be pored over, read into, gazed upon, searched for meanings hidden and overt. Toby Harrah’s last name is a palindrome. Aurelio Monteagudo has all five vowels in his first name. Ed Figueroa has all five vowels in his last name. Len Randle is poised to field a ball—knees bent, head up, glove gaping—despite already holding a baseball in his meat hand. Tito Fuentes is wearing an orange terry-cloth headband around the outside crown of his Giants cap.
These men have sideburns like the snow brushes we keep in the way back of the station wagon. Their Afros make Mickey Mouse ears out the sides of their caps. Not a single player smiles as he stares into the middle distance of some sun-scorched spring-training field with a faintly menacing air of take-the-damn-picture-already impatience. And yet these men, these cardboard giants, are in almost all other ways exactly like Kevin and me.
The back of every 1974 Topps card has a short sentence about the player. And in many cases what we learn is that the player works in the real world when he isn’t playing baseball. Like the records in Kevin’s big sister’s room—the 45s, the singles—the flip side of these cards is less prominent but often more interesting and rewarding.
Doug Griffin’s fact appears beneath a line drawing of a baseball player in a carnival ticket booth, a string of tickets spilling outward like sausage links. The caption says, “Doug spends off-seasons selling tickets for the Bosox.” Whatever the job, the player is always depicted in full uniform, so that pitcher Paul Splittorff is drawn making milk deliveries while dressed for a Royals game: “Paul works for a dairy during the off-season.” Skip Lockwood—briefcase, baseball uniform—“works in life insurance off-season.” Lee Lacy—mailbag, baseball uniform—“handles mail in off-season.” Steve Busby—hard hat, baseball uniform—“is a construction foreman off-season.” Chuck Goggin won a Purple Heart and Bronze Star in Vietnam and then wore them—according to the cartoon on the back of his card—pinned to his baseball uniform.