Paul's Boutique

The Sounds Of Science

Dwight Gooden. Doctor K. If I could stitch a name and number on the back of my replica Mets jersey, you know it'd be his. It's one thing to watch a pitcher throw strikes. It's next-level when he dominates grown men...every five days.

We don't have major league ball where I'm from, but we grew up thinking like we did (and we almost got a team too, but I don't know the politics because...I'm a player, not a suit). America. Any city, town, or municipality knows baseball at some level.

Ninety feet between bases. Sixty feet and six inches between the pitcher's rubber and home plate, where a man throws a stitched-up projectile weighing five point two five ounces and is nine point two five inches around at a speed of nearly one hundred miles per hour toward another man armed with stick of ash or maple roughly three feet long and thirty-some odd ounces heavy. That's science. And math, once you learn how to pay attention.

Sundays are off days...nobody goes to the parks because we're all busy with forced family stuff. That's where I found my first bat...in my grandmother's garage. She also had cable, so that's where I learned to watch the game, but that's sort of not the point. The bat felt like a solid tank in my hands. So heavy...must be great. So powerful. When we dream of home runs at night, this is what they're made from...giant clubs our small frames can't possibly manipulate.

Enter Doc Gooden.

I wasn't gonna startle anyone with my hitting prowess anyway...I had to navigate backwards if I wanted to figure out how to win. Learn to pitch. Develop your arm. A two-seam fastball, a nasty change-up, and a curveball that makes your peers look silly swingin'. I now had a visual in Doc. I had a means to practice...

See, us ballpark kids generally used the "lob it in there" method during pickup games. We weren't so fancy that we could get away with a ton of b******* anyway, so we leveled off a lot just to make things fair. Put the ball in play, and everyone feels like it was worth it just to come out.

But those summer Sundays, my man...that's when I learned what it meant to get nasty with a baseball. Or a tennis ball. Anything that would feel round in my fingers, really, and would bounce back...

My gramma's backyard wasn't big. At all. It wasn't built for any sports, no matter how hard I tried. Awkward dimensions. A burnt-out farm house that led to a garage in the way-back-when. Rose bushes. Power lines and fences. Neighbors who weren't neighborly. But I needed to throw.

Uncle Tom would work on trucks in his free time...he drove a big one, and still lived at home but wasn't around much. There was a giant hood in gramma's backyard against the garage with what looked like a bullseye painted on it, and some tires. I got creative and stacked up one tire on another with the spray-painted "strike box" inside the top one...and I threw. I threw. To my heart's content, I threw.

And when you're bangin' cork bound in leather and threads as hard as you can against the metal built for a truck in 1970-something, the noise is bound to resonate. Especially, apparently, to your mom and grandmother, who were playing Yahtzee in a room far removed from your outdoor "boys being boys"-ishness.

Dwight Gooden threw as hard as anyone. As far as sports heroes goes, he was my first. But the Mets tried to bolster their lineup that summer, and traded for a guy named Terry Leach. A ridiculous sidearmer with submarine fastballs, cutters, and sinkers. The nerd pitcher's nerd pitcher. I stopped bangin' baseballs off the hood of a Ford truck just to be careful with placement, which suddenly meant something. More than a crest on my chest or the team I was watching. I went sidearm because that meant winning, and Leach also had a killer mustache. Maybe if I ripped enough baseballs through old tires, I could grow that fu manchu. At that point, I didn't need to be Dr. K...I needed to be 10-1 with an untouchable ERA. Rough up the doc all you want...I'm gonna learn how to sidearm a ball effectively enough to make you look silly.

But...science. Or maybe genetics; I don't know. Like I said, we all just lobbed pitches anyway at the park, so mostly everyone could get a hit and/or put the ball in play. No place for a sidearm showoff when just the basics are necessary. Life's a g**d*** mess like that sometimes...you go through all the trouble to learn a new skill, but the science of humans requests you bang metal awkwardly over disrupting the easy compliance of everyone else. I'd trade one billion Sundays in a cramped area over your six other days with crybabies longing for participation trophies instead of teaching themselves that the revolution isn't 60'6". Silly-a** Little League all stars! I have something to prove too!

Lyrics.  

Word Count: 851.