Field of miscreants

by David Benjamin

“Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.” ― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe

MADISON, Wis.—In the Wisconsin town where I lived ’til I was thirteen, there were two “official” baseball fields, complete with infield and outfield, chainlink fence and backstop, benches for the players to sit on, and all the other rigmarole. Most kids, in those days, never set foot on either one.

Specifically, our most glamorous “diamond” was on Glendale Avenue, just north of the Milwaukee Road tracks, where I watched home-talent games between our town team—composed largely of twenty-somethings who had played ball for the high school—and teams from around the county. There might have been high-school games there, too, as well as Pony League games for kids who had aged out of Little League. This field, for rank-and-file kids, was off limits.

Little League occupied the other discernible baseball field, at the end of Packard Street, a block or two back of Woodliff’s grocery. This field was nice enough to require special privilege for admission. Kids not signed up as members of the midget Braves, Cubs, Sox or Yankees were discouraged from using it, even when it was empty. I trespassed once with brother Bill and my cousins, Danny and Bobby. The ground was flat, the grass was mowed and sweet-smelling. I could gallop the whole outfield without watching out for gopher holes or tripping over a rusty length of barbed wire, a rock or a half-buried paint can. Bobby hit a tailing line drive along the left field line (there was an actual, visible line!). With wings on my Keds, I loped across the luxuriant green carpet all the way from center field and snagged the ball like Billy Bruton poaching on Wes Covington’s turf.
Nobody drove us away that day, but we didn’t linger and never went back. To use this field, or the grownup diamond on Glendale, meant breaching a barrier that was social, generational and subliminal.

We didn’t belong.

Two of the fields where I played most of my ball—quite badly—were downhill from the two elementary schools on Monroe Street. The St. Mary’s playground was asphalt and too small for baseball. By fourth grade, the bigger boys in my class could hit a softball over the chainlink fence onto Hollister Avenue. Picture Ernie Banks clearing the bleachers at Wrigley and bouncing a homer onto Waveland Avenue.

Across the street, the Miller School had more space. There was a sprawling “baseball field,” with a battered chickenwire backstop, that bordered an entire block on Hollister and stretched uphill to the paved patch of playground where girls played jacks and four-square. All of our Catholics vs. Publics baseball battles took place on the Miller School sandlot. It had its challenges.

The infield was eight inches deep in actual sand, sprouting by May with sandburs that occupied you between innings, picking them off your jeans. On this field, a hard-hit grounder tended to burrow into the sand and spin in place, forcing the shortstop to excavate the ball in a swirl of flying grit and fire it half-blind in the general direction of the first baseman.

Uphill, above the sandpit, left field was a patchwork of weed clumps interspersed with what Matthew, in Chapter 13, calls “stony places” with “not much earth.” Center field, which featured a grove of ancient oaks, was an adventure where a routine fly ball was likely to hit the branches, elude the outfielder and turn into a three-base hit, followed by vituperation from the fielder’s teammates. The ground below mixed rocks with sand and more sandburs, above which the roots of the trees jutted like the petrified sinews of dead dragons. Running incautiously after the ball on this terrain was an invitation to trip and take flight, bark your shins, rip your jeans and skin your non-glove hand down to the bloody hypodermis. Center field at the Miller School was where you sent your worst player. I knew it well.

One summer, I teamed with a bunch of kids who hacked a baseball field out of a hillside overlooking Council Creek. We had to trample down the high grass, yank a lot of thistles (more blood) and compose a special ground rule to account for the twelve-foot tree in center field. There was no backstop, so any batter who didn’t swing at every pitch spent a lot of time chasing the ball into the gully below the field. We only had one ball so whenever one of us shanked a drive into the knee-high weeds in right field, we had to launch a search that could take twenty minutes. But we played there gamely ’til the old lady whose garden was just beyond third base came out of her woodshed with a twelve-gauge and hollered that we’d better get the hell out or a couple of us would go home with a backside full of buckshot.

When I lived on that end of town, we also played tackle on my grandfather’s huge yard—I know how huge because I had to mow it—along Superior Avenue. But all of the kids mauling one another on the grass kept a weather eye for T.J. My grandfather had a well-earned reputation as the neighborhood grouch. If he arrived home in one of his typical foul moods, after a hard day of plumbing, he might suddenly descend on our game, raging, sputtering and calling us brats, punks, delinquents, useless, shiftless dead-end kids. We would scatter like sparrows.

He was right, of course. In those days, adults had not yet thought of taming and regimenting the bands of boys who roved the town and prowled its alleys. By the sheer fact of our freedom—especially in the summertime—we were chronic trespassers, burglars, vandals. Extemporaneous petty crime was the definition of boyhood.

T.J. had an orchard. We not only stole his apples before they were properly ripe, we also had a hideout beneath one of his trees—made of plywood we had swiped from a construction site on the new street that was eventually named after T.J. We had another hideout in the woods beyond the Milwaukee Road storage yard, which we had furnished with rusty railroad devices taken from the yard—not because we had any use for them, or any idea what to do with them. We took the stuff because it was just sitting out there, ripe for the taking. And we forsook it all and cheezed it when a railroad guard appeared from the bushes and wondered—loudly—what the hell we thought we were doing.

Thought?

We didn’t mind leaving. We had other hideouts. We made regular visits to both town dumps, scavenging treasures that suggested the possibility of “making something” by putting them together with other contraband, only to lose interest and leave it on the back porch ’til a grownup tripped over it, disparaged it profanely and consigned it back to the dump from which it came.

If there was a derelict house or an an abandoned store, we found a way to get inside. Once, we jimmied a crawlspace window and crept through layers of dust six inches deep to burgle a condemned bottling plant and found, inside, nary a bottle to burgle. In my last break-in, however, when I was thirteen, I detached book shelves from a decommissioned American Legion hall. I filled them with books, none of which I’d stolen.

I don’t think boys do the kind of stuff I used to do. They don’t run loose and duck around corners—even when they’re not doing anything wrong—when they spot a grownup. They have manicured ballfields. They have coaches and batting practice, and lots of balls. They all carry smartphones, where they can look up their schedules. Boys have schedules.

We didn’t. That’s what got us into trouble.

But then, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler, trouble was our business.