Dante\’s In for Knowing Stuff

Here is an early opener of my new creation, Dante, the smoke breathing dragon. My thought is he is just on the verge of entering adolescence, immature and childish but impatient with not knowing where he fits in his development but eager to become an adult. He doesn’t feel like a child and he doesn’t feel like like an adult and this can be isolating for him.

I expect Dante to make some minor physical changes as I learn more about building these things so don’t get too used to him. Lillian seems to love him though and that to me is a sure sign of success.

As I practiced and practiced and practiced some more I felt as though my pitching had improved and I was ready to pitch a game.  To move from center-field, the position I normally held, to pitcher was not going to be an easy sell. I was known for my speed and intensity, not my arm and accuracy throwing.

Each game I hounded the coach to let me try pitching. I had played at least every position but pitcher and I felt that my practice had made me worthy of getting the chance to try it. I recall the coach denying me on several occasions stating he needed me in the outfield, but I didn’t give up asking. One day when the team had an impressive lead over our opponents and we were near a shut out, the coach put me in to pitch.

I quickly and proudly took the pitcher’s mound. I have no recollection of anything positive happening in this experience. The first batter was a walk and so was the next. My confidence shrank to the size of a speck of dust and was lost to the dirt of the field. Each batter that proceeded the first was walked, our lead shrinking with each at bat. I looked at the coach with a plea of desperation to be pulled, saved from my misery and embarrassment and left to cower in the corner of the dugout. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. I was stranded on the mound and I had to keep throwing the ball.

My memory recalls the other team laughing at first and then becoming somber perhaps feeling embarrassed for me. I had no outs and it was more than apparent that I could not pitch. The coach stood there expressionless.

There was no relief just isolation and the torture of having to go on pitching. In reality I probably walked in two runs or something. This whole event most likely lasted for ten minutes, but the emotional trauma was extensive and never ending.

At some point in the game both teams had suffered enough at my attempt to pitch and I was pulled. I think we even went on to win the game.I didn’t take this experience as a lesson to get better at pitching. Instead, I took it as a lesson in not trying something I don’t seem to have a natural ability at and that once I fail at something I will continue to fail so it is pointless to try it again.

I think I took it that the coach was teaching me a lesson to never pester him again about pitching and after that day, I never did.

In all honesty I only have a few experiences or memories like this in sports but I do have a tremendous amount of amazingly beautiful ones. For some reason though in my wiring the negatives overwhelm the positives, beat them up, and steal their baseball card bubble gum.

For all you kids playing baseball this spring, have fun, learn something about the game/yourself, and don’t be afraid to ask questions or fail. It’s a game and you can’t win em all so try to have as much fun as possible losing and/or winning.

Batter up!

This past weekend my wife and I watched the movie Moneyball. I really enjoyed the movie. The next day we went to visit my parents. My mother was watching the Cleveland Indians on television. Later, my eight year old nephew and I were outside hitting a wiffle ball. He kept dropping his shoulder and hitting pop-ups.

I was telling him he should practice hitting a stationary ball. Saying this out loud, the smell of spring in the air, baseball on television and watching Moneyball the night before brought back memories of my youth and my love of the game.

I played little league baseball for nearly every summer from kindergarten till I entered high school. In the beginning of each new season the excitement for sign-ups was nearly unbearable but by the middle of the season I would moan and complain of being tired of playing. Each year it was the same thing.

Playing wiffle ball with my nephew made me reminisce of some methods I used to improve my game.

To work on my swing my father did two things for me, he drilled a hole through a large, dense, rubber ball and hung it from a tree branch and he gave me a baseball bat fit for an adult. I could barely lift that big wooden bat it felt like trying to hold up Thor’s hammer while treading water. My father told me that by practicing swinging it I would get stronger and my swing would improve and that I would grow into the bat. Whatever, that meant. I would train like Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV hitting that ball as hard as I could.

Time is gracious for children. They have time to learn things and to do it repetitively whenever they feel like it, sometimes for no reason other than because they have the time. I was no different. I went outside and I swung at the hard rubber ball whenever I had nothing else to do or anyone else to play with.

When I told him I wanted to be a pitcher he placed a piece of plywood against the back of the house and spray painted the strike zone in the middle of it. From there I could practice pitching on my own.

I felt like Roy Hobbs, or I fancied myself as the natural. The smartest smoking moustache I knew may not have been physically capable of playing catch or tossing me some pitches to work on my swing, but he was supportive and resourceful.

I can remember throwing that ball at the back of the house after dinner till it was too dark to see anymore. My goal was to be pitcher and if I was going to do it I had to get better.

I wanted to try out a new format and to just use ink.

For this week’s IF topic I wanted to do something involving the character Dagny Taggart from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

She is one of the most capable people in that world.  I wanted to do something in an art deco style using humans. I was running out of time to submit something and so I meditated for ten minutes. Before my time was up I thought of the Dagny character as an ant.

Ants are capable of carrying extremely heavy loads and I thought this was as good as a doodle as any in the time frame I had to work in so here you have it, Dantny Tantert, hard at work figuring out the ant lines.