Stealing Home

The first of September was the last of my games. One final home game, and this time I’m really at home. I’ve seen 9 new stadiums, and meticulously combed over each one like an architect, or at least a prospective buyer. I’ve gone to the top decks and gotten as close as each stadium’s security allow. As many times as I’ve been to Yankee Stadium, I haven’t gotten to know it as well.

This time, I tried to see this ballpark as I saw all the others. Curiously, objectively, I try to use it as a clue to the way this city sees itself. I would see it absent my normal habits and new traditions. I would see it free of the entanglements of history and sentimentality. Have you ever tried to see your home the way a guest might see it? Have you ever looked at your home the way a thief will see it?

I never get to Yankee Stadium in time for batting practice. After work, getting there, meeting up, and a few rounds at Stan’s, I rarely make it to the seats in time for role call. This time I decide to be there as early as I’ve been to other stadiums. I like watching batting practice. Sometimes you can tell when a hitter is going to have a good or bad day by what they do in the cage. Many people show up with gloves to try to catch a ball. I’m not here for souvenirs (plus, Pittsburgh) so after a few minutes, I line up to see Monument Park for the first time.

This time, back home but looking like a visitor, I walked among the retired numbers and plaques, but I kept looking out at the active players, still tuning up for the game. More people should look at the field from there; it’s a great center field view. But they don’t, they’re looking at plaques of the past and the pictures they’ve just taken. The team puts up netting to protect the people from being hit by shots just like the one I saw one of the Oakland A’s crank out from the batter’s box. It looked and sounded like a no-doubt dead-center shot. It flew true, straight to where I was standing. The net caught the ball, and I caught the net and stopped it from dropping into the flowerbed at my feet. The kid next to me with his baseball glove—the obnoxious one with no parents and no manners who kept pushing—looked at me like I’d found a puppy. Or a porkchop. I said, “Get your glove ready,” and let the ball drop into it. I could have kept it, but that wasn’t the ball I wanted.

I had had the only ball I wanted for most of my life. When I was seven and a half, I was taken to Cooperstown to see Hank Aaron get inducted into the Hall of Fame. My father and uncle and I lined up to get autographs from some of those already in the hall. The scam was that they advertised all the old-timers that were there, but once you got close, you realized you could only go to one of the three tables. Stan Musial didn’t like that. He took his chair and his pen and set up in front to sign for all comers. I had gotten a ball that had his face and signature printed on it. I handed it to him, and he looked at it twice, and me once, and smiled and signed it. Stan the Man indeed.

I was put on the line with people I would only later come to know. And even later, on this road trip, I would see many of them memorialized (often posthumously) in their own cities. Bob Feller’s statue stands outside the main gate in Cleveland. Ralph Kiner’s number 4 is retired in Pittsburgh. Billy Herman is remembered in Wrigley. Bill Dickey is right there in Monument Park. That ball is one of the two things that survived every one of my moves, modes, and moods. In every one of my rooms, it has been on display, however subtly, in the plastic case made specially for keeping special baseballs. It connected me to my past—that first trip to Cooperstown—and baseball’s past—It was signed by players my grandfather looked up to. It was one of six items stolen from my home two years ago. It was the last of the six that I discovered gone, and the one that is irreplaceable. I looked at the clean black circle left in the dust by the deft thief, and for a while hoped that I had only misplaced it.

That was the one ball I wanted, and this ball was not that. I thought that it might be, though, for that little shithead. When I gave it to him, he looked at me with disbelief but no gratitude, as if I were the dumb one and he’d just gotten one over on me.

I thought for some time that I’d get the ball back. Something that unique must be traceable. It hasn’t been. I think I know I won’t ever see it again. When something like that is taken from you, it doesn’t ever come back. And something else gets taken from you too. You can’t come home from a long trip or a long day without wondering what’s still behind your door. There’s always a moment—a drawing in of breath that doesn’t get released until you see that this time your TV is right where you left it.

When you’re on the road for two weeks, every now and then you wonder if, at that moment, or the night before, or the next, you are being violated. You know there is nothing you can do about it but stay home. That’s no way to win. The object of the game is to run around so you can come home. And when you are home, you hear the same sounds but now you wonder if the thief has come back to see you again. In the dark, you turn your head toward your protection plan—A baseball bat, of course—that is being kept to be used nearer to the bed than the ball field.