I never played catch with my father.
I even had, as lawyers like to say, two bites at the apple, a biological father and a step-father, and I never threw a baseball around with either of them. (To be fair, Dad #1 wasn’t even around by the time I was eating solid food, much less throwing balls.) I didn’t grow up in a country that doesn’t play baseball. I wasn’t uninterested in the sport. I wasn’t even unskilled. We lived in Tennessee and Kentucky, Washington and California. I started playing tee-ball just as soon as I was old enough, and while no one ever mistook me for a future major-leaguer, I was the best starting pitcher on my team a couple of times and a solid doubles hitter with a patient approach at the plate. There was every reason for a catch to happen.
And yet: no catch.
We were a military family for most of the time my parents were married. Dad was stationed at Forts Campbell and Ord, and our year in Washington, where both parents grew up, was his sort of gap year between enlistments. He was gone a lot while he was in the Army, of course, on maneuvers or deployed to Central America doing god-knows-what, so you’d think that the time he was home might be spent, at least in part, tossing a ball around with his son, even if that son wasn’t his real son, even if he’d insisted on having another child so he’d have one that was actually his own.
But no, Saturday afternoons would find him on the couch, doing something ridiculous like watching golf. I definitely wasn’t going to be the one to suggest a catch. He scared me. He wasn’t any louder or bigger or more violent than anybody else. I certainly wasn’t abused. But he scared me anyway. There was something in his aloofness, I think, that made me believe he was dismayed to have this somewhat pudgy kid with thick glasses walking around with his last name, masquerading as his child. The cliche aloof father in all the movies is magnetic somehow, drawing the child in with his distance, creating a mysterious sense of respect that later events reveal was not fully earned.
This was not my experience. He, I was pretty certain, wanted no part of me, so what exactly did I have to gain from drawing his attention? Better to go see what some neighborhood kids were doing or obsessively record the statistics from my Nintendo Baseball game or read for the 20th time the November issue of Boys’ Life.
So I’ve got some parental attention issues in my past. Am I buying a farm in Iowa to build a baseball field, so I can finally have a catch with my dad? Not likely. I don’t actually have any regrets about this particular (lack of) experience — I have a larger regret that the sole father-son memory I have is of learning to ride a bike, and even then, I feel a little resentment that he led me to believe I could ride my BMX through anything, directly resulting in my crashing straight into the center of a bush with a rather solid stump. But as to this baseball issue specifically? Not really.
In fact, I’m thankful in a way. Twilight ball-tossing might have given me romantic notions of the game and led me to think that steroids were the root of all evil, that bunting is selfless sacrifice that best represents the true glory of the grandest sport of all. Instead, my hours tracking the stats from my NES games pointed me in the stat-nerd direction — when you spend more time playing a game where all the players are the same size and have the same skill than you do actually playing real baseball, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that you end up believing players are stat-generating robots.
On the Butterfly Effect theory, had my dad played catch with me, I wouldn’t have started a blog in 2003, I wouldn’t be internet-friends with The Baseball Geeks of Twitter, I wouldn’t be contributing to *The Platoon Advantage*, and I’d be one of those angry A’s fans, railing against the slide-rules in the front office who need to get their heads out of Excel and watch a real game sometime.
No, in the grand dynamical system of life, I drew the input of “dad doesn’t really care,” so this parade of horribles was avoided. I think that’s worth a thank you. If only I had his address.
Jason is the founder (in 2003) and sole author of Beaneball.org, , a blog about the A’s. He also contributes to Platoon Advantage on more general baseball topics. He wrote his college thesis in computational number theory but is now a labor lawyer. He tweets too much at @jlwoj.