Hitting Advice

My father saw that my sister and I were having too much fun playing softball and he wanted in on it when I was eight. He promptly studied a few baseball books and signed up to be an assistant coach. He sort of did that anytime we found something fun. He’d start studying it and take over. As long as whatever we were into didn’t make him physically cold. He hated the two years we played hockey. Wanted zero part of it. He co-coached our softball team by the book. He’d hand out bubble gum before a game and tell us when we got up to bat to chew it hard like we meant business. Blow a bubble at the pitcher. It would intimidate her. That was our team’s “secret weapon.” He started to preach the tenets of softball to me in everyday life, well outside of softball practice and games. He’d tell me I should do something every day to improve my game, be it a game of catch, or pointing out that someone on the Red Sox did not get a hit because they took his eye off the ball. “Keep your eye on the ball and you’ll get a hit,” was his most common piece of advice. After a bad at-bat, he would tell me I took my eye off the ball.

This may have been irritating to some kids, but I was actually good at softball. Very good. I hit tons of home runs and had a lot of game-winning RBIs. I didn’t have a lot of bad at-bats. Seeing your own hits go sailing over everyone’s heads after the ball made contact with the exact sweet spot of your bat imbues one with a sense of power. I was a decent fielder and could throw fast and far. Having a cheerleader at home was fun.

This was true until my varsity year in high school. That is when softball switched over to fast pitch and apparently that’s the year that teenage girls make a pact with Satan. I know this because there was no way any human could underhand throw a ball that quickly across the plate. It was much like an arcane magic trick, where the ball was in the pitcher’s hand one minute and then in the catcher’s glove within milliseconds. As if the pitcher actually palmed the ball and the catcher had another that just looked like the one she had. I got one hit that entire season and mostly rode the bench. I was horrible. My father would pick me up after a game and ask me if I got any hits. I would tell him no I didn’t. He would say, “Hmm, you must have taken your eye off the ball.”

Finally, after one game, I lost my patience. “Yes, Dad. I did take my eye off the ball because I didn’t sell my soul to Satan. Home runs are fun, but not Faustian bargain fun.” He gave me a weird look and didn’t talk to me for the rest of the ride. I felt bad and apologized the next day. He nodded and silently acknowledged this was just one piece of his little girl getting left behind in childhood. For the rest of the season, I just pretended I wasn’t playing softball. I would just put on a uniform of some sort and sat on a bench occasionally. It was depressing. He stopped asking me about softball.

I let that year fizzle. I took up other interests. When I say I took up interests I mean that I took them up in that way that a father may tell his daughter to keep her eye on the ball even when she is not playing softball. I think about fossils while I am stirring my pasta for lunch. I drive by a meadow on my way to work and wonder how many of the plants there are edible. So my father and I hunt for fossils. We go foraging for wild edibles. We talk about these things endlessly. But I do still have my soul. Maybe I’ll use it to win the lottery. My father and I often talk about statistics and analyzing the lottery. He has many theories on how to win. They are just as well-intentioned, and yet just as wrong as his hitting advice.