Not a Team Player

Every Little League or Rec League game includes every other ballgame you’ve ever been to the way every death resonates with all your past losses. The games vibrate with the memory of baseball in all its myriad forms - the fathers playing the counselors in summer camp in the Poconos in the ‘50s when your soft, rotund father tripped on the base paths; our kids back in the Berkshires in the blue and white uniforms of the Stockbridge Astros; those minor league games in Pittsfield where you saw Greg Maddux pitch before he became famous in Atlanta; Sunday softball, a religious observance for many years, and all the contests at Fenway during the long drought before 2004. It all resurfaces if the weather is balmy, the aroma of something greasy fills the air and the parents are more avid than the players. Sitting on the unforgiving benches in Minnesota brought it all back.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

The coach moved the kids around to get the full baseball-diamond-on-a-summer-night experience. I noticed that for the most part they were fully awake on the field. This is a sign of maturity on a par with being able to sit through a meal in a restaurant without needing to take a break to run around in the parking lot. My grandson made a catch in left and executed a play at second. Afterwards when we were heading to our cars, he demanded that I hug him. This is the grand slam of grandmahood. The game went on for two hours while we sat in the bleachers eating egg salad sandwiches and cherries, the sun beating down and the breeze blowing through. We were talking baseball in the heartland and Donald Trump had just been convicted of thirty-four felony counts. It doesn’t get much better than that.

It’s not often that you get a stark exposé of guilt followed immediately by a warm bath of innocence. The morality play hit every spot. There he was the glowering, vengeful Ex, the ultimate poor sport, insulting the judge and the jury, refusing to accept the verdict the same way he refused to accept the election outcome in 2020. And there were the boys, lurking around adolescence, some long and lean, some pudgy, lining up for that touching ritual where the two teams walk past each other slapping hands and acknowledging that it’s just a game and besides school’s almost over.  Apparently, they didn’t do this sort of thing in Queens. Or maybe the Ex wanted to play ball but never got picked. Just not a team player. I wonder what he was doing on those long June evenings during the Eisenhower administration when the other kids were tagging up at third and sliding into home. Is it possible that world history is now unfolding in the shadow of his yearning to belong?  

There he was in the upscale environs of Jamaica Estates crushed by the cruelty of the tyrannical Nazi father. Now seven decades later, he rises out of a deep sleep across the bridge in the lower Manhattan courtroom to indulge in his favorite pastimes of finger pointing and name-calling. By the sheer force of bullying and bribery, pouting and prevarication, he continues to sulk his way into the public eye if not its heart. He defines the term sore loser. Not the kind of kid you want on your team. Plus now that it’s 2024, he’s an over-the-hill sore loser, grievance and gray flourishing under the orange hair piece. It’s stunning for me to watch both presidential candidates babbling away while I consider my own loss of memory and mental acuity. In a recent cognitive performance test, I was really good at identifying pictures of a camel and a rhino, but failed at remembering a short list of words five minutes after they had been read to me. A heavy curtain lowered over my awareness when I tried to recall the words. Four of them got stuck in storage according to the administrator of the test. Imagine what’s stuck in Trump’s storage along with the cartons of classified papers at Mar-a-lago. Imagine the meat rotting in the back of the refrigerator, the clothes in the rear of the closet that no longer fit and the lingering memories of all the times he didn’t get picked for the team. Sad to say, he is beyond redemption, beyond baseball. Guilty as charged.

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