BASEBALL

Playing Catch

Tim Morris finds that even major leaguers just wanna have fun

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by Tim Morris

Any ball club faced with time to kill will separate naturally into pairs and start to play catch. Any pair of ballplayers playing catch miss the ball more or less often; in Little League, more. When I watch my son and his friends practice, I gravitate behind a line of throwers, so I can stop the balls and toss them back ...

...and later that day, I'm at the Ballpark in Arlington, pacing the grass behind home plate, trying to look like a serious journalist instead of skipping around chirping "I'm on the field! I'm on the field!"

Ballplayers assemble, drawn by an unconscious force, to play catch along the foul lines. Here too, baseballs can bonk off a glove or a shoe. I'm standing near a fungo circle when an infielder tosses a ball past the coach. The ball rolls to my feet. The appropriate sportswriterly response to a loose baseball is to nudge it away with your foot, spurning the very thing you've come to write about. But there are times when such nonchalance would be positively impolite, so I pick up this ball and toss it to the coach, thinking afterwards: this is where I belong, standing in the background, helping out.

It's a dangerous thing, this baseball-filled air. Only the angels in the outfield seem to keep Little Leaguers from harm. On a major league field, it's sometimes a point of honor to play catch as hard as you can, increasing the peril. Two guys stand near the dugout steps and throw hard enough to make each other cry, laughing as they do to keep from crying. Cameramen and batboys skirt past the throwers, as if manhood were made up of walking as close as possible to a deadly missile without flinching.

One night, I watch coach Mel Stottlemyre play catch with a reliever just inches outside the Yankee dugout. The reliever is playing "soft toss;" Stottlemyre, under no such constraint, is airing it out. He's almost 60 years old, but he was one of the most hellacious pitchers of his time. Now he starts to cackle madly as he turns up the speed. The reliever catches the ball and shakes his glove hand gently. He lobs it back to Stottlemyre, who goes into a half windup and sends it back at murderous speed. I sit very still in the dugout, like a man transfixed by a rattlesnake.

Just then, crossing six parallel lines of fire where a dozen Yankees are playing catch, David Cone dances, ducks, weaves, and spins between the baseballs. He reaches the dugout. He pants in mock terror. Here's eight million dollars worth of pitcher trusting his braincase to the same gods who watch over nine-year-olds.

They just never, ever get hit, I tell myself; but then, a few weeks later, Ranger outfielder Rusty Greer is felled by a teammate playing catch in the outfield. Why do they risk it, I ask. The answer is clear. Playing catch is more fun than playing baseball. If you stopped playing catch and running around beside your friends playing catch, there would be no point to baseball at all.

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