The Triangle Part 2

If truth be told, it was the fault of Joe Croce and his brother Stephen for initiating our attempts to upgrade the Triangle (see previous blog, The Triangle Part 1).  Joe and Stephen’s older cousins played semi-professional baseball, and they donated their old uniforms to their kin.  When Joe and his younger brother showed up at the Triangle sporting blue-striped cotton uniforms with logos and laces and attached belts, we were all envious.  Suddenly our dungarees with worn spots or even holes in the knees seemed rather shabby.  There was not much we could do to improve our personal appearance, but we decided to spruce up the Triangle, our playing field.

Paint was not available, so we thought we could more clearly define the baselines by running string between bases.  A few nails hammered into the ground and wrapped with twine seemed to do the trick.  The actual bases, which were nothing more than bare spots in the grass, needed upgrading.   Over the following week parents of the Triangle Gang began missing patches of extra carpet and one or two small throw rugs.  Behind home plate was the heavily trafficked Edgewater Avenue, and, as our pitching (and catching) had a tendency to miss the fine corners of the strike zone, catchers were constantly dodging cars to retrieve errant pitches.  Over the succeeding week, parents of the Triangle Gang noticed the disappearance of hammers, nails, and planks of wood.  We built a rather large wooden backstop, not particularly symmetrical, but hopefully wide enough to prevent wild pitches (which, for some players, were all pitches) from bouncing off Chevy’s and Ford’s and the occasional Mack truck.

After two weeks of after school stringing, and nailing and hammering fingers blue, the Triangle Gang was ready to play its first game on the renovated Triangle.  With some difficulty, we dragged the five foot by six foot high (some of us, acutely aware of Gundy’s propensity to make Ryne Duren look like a pin point pitcher in comparison, wanted the backstop even wider and higher) down the sidewalk along Shaler Boulevard.  Pulling and tugging, we finally had the backstop in place, and we gathered in a circle around it, marveling at the massive structure that loomed over us much like the chimpanzees in awe of the monolith in the movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey.

The Triangle seemed to gleam with newness, the taut strings of twine connecting the bases, the bases themselves testimonies to our parents’ taste in carpeting and throw rugs, and the sentinel over all of it our wooden backstop, like the billboard eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg from The Great Gatsby looking over the entire expanse of the Triangle and seeing all.  No township officials seemed to mind what we were doing—after all, the only value the triangle of green grass spotted with brown patches possessed was its importance to the Triangle Gang.  The township officials also did not express any appreciation of our enhancements.

We also dressed appropriately for the occasion, sporting our best baseball caps and dungarees.  The Croce brothers showed up in their cousin’s semi-pro uniforms of course.  The night before I had worked some linseed oil into my Mickey Mantle Glove.  The lettering identifying the glove as America’s Choice was beginning to fade, but the manufacturer’s tag, Made in Japan, was still legible.  I was ready.

We spent the usual two hours choosing sides, this particular occasion adding a wrinkle to decide which team captain had first choice of players.  Whoever won the hand over hand contest with the Louisville slugger now had to hold the bat with the tips of his fingers while the opposing captain had three chances to kick it out of the first captain’s frail grip.  That settled, sides chosen after much deliberation about fairness (“if you pick Don then I get two picks”), and positions determined in the field, who was going to play where, it was time to play ball.

Gundy struck out the first batter, Bernie, which was to be expected since Bernie swung at any pitch this side of the Hudson River.   Next, Sal Grasso got the meat of the bat on a Gundy changeup and hammered it to left field.  We were all cheering as we encouraged Sal to keep going after he rounded first.  Sal obliged and picked up speed rounding second.  We watched his brother Joey have trouble picking up the ball from Mr. Arnuff’s front yard, and so we screamed at Sal to keep going.  Sal put it into fourth gear and had just passed third when it happened.  He tripped over the string delineating the baseline between third and home and staggered like a wounded and drunken sailor trying to regain his balance into Englehardt Terrace, a street that usually accommodated light traffic, but, at this moment, looked more like the New Jersey Turnpike.  There was much honking of horns and some adult language issued from anonymous drivers, but Sal avoided getting run over, although when he slid on the macadam he tore his dungarees and his knees needed massive doses of mercurochrome that evening.

Of course, since all the strings between bases were connected, Sal’s dragging of the third base to home line meant all the strings between all the bases were now fettered to the sneaker of his right foot.  Identifying the baseline by stringing twine had been a colossal mistake.  In a half hour or so, we were able to free Sal’s entanglement with the twine and he endured our taunts referring to his appearance as a piece of prey wrapped in silk by a giant spider.

The problem was, of course, what to do with the play. While Sal struggled furiously to extricate himself like a fly in a spider’s web, Joey retrieved the ball, tossed it to Stephen who tagged Sal out.  What ensued was one of the thousands of arguments involving fairness.  To kids, fairness is a perpetual ethic that permeates every deed, every action, every observation.  Kids are obsessed with fairness.  Adults not so much.  Was it fair that Sal was called out because he tripped over a field enhancement that, for him, became an impediment?   We argued and deliberated and shouted our opinions on universal justice without either side convincing the other.  Later on in college, the Augustinians taught me to examine the morality of every action, especially as a causality of future events.  But even as a youthful member of the Triangle Gang, I pondered the fairness of the call.  Was Sal an operative of his own free will, and thus responsible for being tagged out, or was he a victim of predestination, his destiny determined by the community stringing the bases together?  The arguments, heated as they were, settled nothing.  Fortunately for us kids, we had a fall back stratagem, a tactic of last resort, if you will.  It was called the “Do Over.”  The Do Over was anchored in fairness, the history of previous events totally forgotten, life beginning anew for both sides.  Sal got to bat again….and struck out, but no one questioned the fairness of the Do Over.  In my more naïve moments of fantasy, I imagine the adult world, married couples, political parties, even nations, employing the Do Over.  “Okay, let’s settle this argument by a Do Over.  Let’s go back to the beginning of the conversation involving loaning money to your brother.” “Maybe we were too hasty in voting to eliminate that health care bill.  Do Over.”  “Invading your country may have been a mistake.  Do Over.”  But the adult world will never adopt the Do Over.  We attach our egos to historical decisions and can’t start anew from the moment.  Pity.

Despite Sal’s destruction of our baseline guidelines, our inaugural game went smoothly until the third inning when two things happened.  Ernie was a short, muscular boy who approached every sport with a snarl.  If sneakers could be sharpened so that sliding into the second baseman would result in a hospital visit, Ernie would carry a rasp.  On the first pitch of the third inning, Ernie grounded to short, and, with Kevin bungling the ball, Ernie had a chance to be safe at first.  Ernie decided to slide into first which resulted in the base (which was Bernie’s mother’s laundry room throw rug) zipping out into Shaler Boulevard and plopping down on the windshield of a Ford, blinding the driver.  There was much honking of horns and adult language and Bernie begging the driver to give him back his mother’s laundry room rug.  Our “bases” obviously had their shortcomings.

In the same inning came the third disaster.  Dennis, the largest member of the Triangle Gang, was perched on third, thanks to a series of errant throws.  Dennis tagged up on Joe’s fly ball to shallow centerfield and raced home to beat the throw.  Bernie, the catcher, reached far to his right to catch the wild throw as Dennis barreled to the plate, his mass and his momentum propelling him past Bernie, past home, past the throw and into the backstop smashing the planks of wood into, essentially, kindling sticks which sprayed Edgewater Avenue. We gathered around Dennis as he lay there, studying cloud formations and trying to recover from the collision with two hundred pounds of wood.  We surveyed the ruins.  Baseline strings gone, bases themselves disappearing in the muck of mud, backstop shattered.  We could have continued the game, but our hearts were not in it.  Our collective dream of playing on a world class venue had evaporation in the vicissitudes of reality.

The world changes with time.  All four of our children played organized sports—baseball and basketball and soccer and field hockey.  I assistant coached on a variety of township and travel teams, and Polley was a basketball league commissioner.  Our kids seemed to have fun, we met a number of nice parents, and we enjoyed our children’s participation.  I cannot recall, however, any of my four playing in a pick-up game. And I regret that.  Ted Williams, noted slugger and baseball manager, was asked why the quality of hitting in the major leagues seemed to be in decline.  Williams laid the problem at the feet of organized sports.  His rationale was that in organized baseball, each kid comes to bat maybe four times a game.   At the Triangle, we got to bat four times an inning, depending on the quality of fielding, and we would play two or three games a day…..at least.

But I also wonder about the larger picture, about more than developing good baseball hitters.  Someone once said, “The business of children is play.”  Working out the fairness of things, not only abiding by the rules but negotiating and collaborating on establishing the rules in the first place (with no adult as overseer) is a huge part of growing up.   We made the rules, and from them evolved certain ethics which formed the core of our adult consciences.  We tried and failed and tried again thus attaining a definite stick-to-it mentality, a skill now identified in educational circles as perseverance. Our parents did not have the need or desire to organize every activity.  Our choices were left to us, intelligent decision making another important attribute of the healthy ego and learned through practice, through trial and error.  And, when mistakes were made (and they were made in abundance) we peacefully strategized our way out of them with the Do Over.  Many adults would profit from learning how the Triangle Gang got along,  and I hope the youths of today form their own Triangle Gangs and enjoy the opportunities to make the rules and struggle with fairness.