Backyard Baseball Narrative

I woke up startled and didn’t know where I was. I had an IV in my arm and my parents were staring at me. The doctor came in

The first pitch that the coach threw to me seared the hair right off my head since it was going so fast. “Strike one!” called the ump. Alright, I needed to believe in my abilities. The next pitched was hurled right in line with my face! When I opened my eyes, I saw that the baseball was a perfect pitch and the catcher hadn’t moved his glove. The coach was making a fool out of me with his famous curve ball. “Strike two!” the umpire proclaimed. The next pitch was the one that I would make my mark on. The pitcher wound up and thrust the ball toward the catcher’s glove. I loaded and fiercely swung as hard as I could. After what seemed like forever, I looked into the catcher’s glove, and there was the ball. I felt dreadful. “Strike three!” I heard in the background. As I walked back to the dugout, I wondered what did I do wrong, what could I have changed, and what does the coach think of

My breakfast started to creep back up my throat as game time got closer and closer. I walked across the patch of grass behind home plate and was towered over by the 30 foot backstop with a huge net suspended from it. My bulging bag of equipment was beginning to make my shoulder hang. I walked down the steps into the cement dugout and placed my bag under the bench that spanned the entire length of the dugout. I sat down, laced up my cleats, and put my warm-up jacket on in preparation for batting practice. I stepped onto the grass surrounding the dugout to get the feeling of how wet the grass was. I dug my cleats into the grass and began my usual routine of taking certain practice swings as I gazed upon the press box in the wake of the backstop. Preceding the burn in my forearms, caused from the practice swings, I marched behind the dugout to the rows of batting cages to wait my turn in line. Pacing back and forth I knew I had to keep my nervousness to a minimum. I popped in a wad of Big League Chew and continued to

It was 1989 and I was 12 years old ,and today I was going to Dorney Park with my father and brother. My fathers employment would host an annual cookout for the employees and family. This year it was going to be held at Dorney Park. Dorney Park is about 20 miles from my home town Easton Pennsylvania

My mom scheduled for it to be in 2 weeks. the day comes and i am nervous, i don't know why because i know what they do, i just was. They put my IV in and put medicine in my system to make me loopy. They wheel me back to the operating room, lay me on a table and put a mask on me. the anaistgyolygest say “ count down from 10 buddy” i say “10, 9, 8-” i am out cold. about 13 hours past, its 8 o'clock, the thing i remember most is how my throat was drier than the dessert. my nurse asks “how you feel buddy?” i reply “it hurts” she told me she would take care of that, i'm not being facetious when i say this, but she turns me on my side and puts a shot in my butt. i rest for another hour then they wheel me out to the car and take me home. getting upstairs was the hardest part,

I first started playing youth baseball back in 2008. I had a passion for it since I was a very young boy. I used to sit at home on my PlayStation 2 playing MLB the show. My baseball idols are Derek Jeter, David Ortiz, Jackie Robinson, Sammy Sosa, and Alfonso Soriano. I used to play catch all the time with my cousin Tristan.

During my grade first year in high school I was quite shy and only had friends that I had known from elementary school and through baseball academy. The year was going decent until just after my birthday in the spring, when I started to get random stomach pains. They started off as just an aching pain but slowly with time became more serious and painful, almost as if you were getting stabbed with a knife. As the pains got worse I started missing school in order to try and recover from what I thought at the time was just a stomach flu. After my first couple weeks off school my parents had a suspicion that maybe this was something worse than a stomach flu so they took me to go see a general practitioner. After the GP did some tests, she wasn’t quite sure what was wrong so she referred me to a local Pediatrician. Again, after seeing the pediatrician and having some tests done there was still no diagnosis for what could be causing the pain. The most plausible explanation was that I must have had bacteria in my intestines that isn’t usually supposed to be there, and because

The start of the spring meant baseball season was right around the corner, and our team was hungrier than ever. Our team had high expectations for ourselves, coaches, and even parents. Every day the warm sun beaten down from our shaded faces to the hard dirt, this marked the perfect time to take sharply hit ground balls and pop flies in between the sacred bright white chalk lines. We took drills on the perfect cut green grass surrounded by the four bases shaped into the perfect diamond, evenly separated ninety feet apart. My team always moved with abrupt hustle feeding for every rep possible, while each metal spike from our cleats gripped tightly into the earth.

it's a hot Texas Sun beat down upon my neck a fast ball whizzed past my bat and into the catcher's glove after you had another strikeout. I trudged back to the dugout thoughts of failure filled my mind of my confidence slowly vanishing. I wasn't accustomed to anything less than success before high school. I prospered in youth athletics while living in South Dakota. I had a phenomenal baseball coach to transform my robbed potential into success on the baseball diamond. Unfortunately, my father's Air Force career demanded that we move before my baseball season. Without me my team went on to win the city state championships advancing all the way to the Little League World. When I was younger my family moved to not affect my athletic performance the difficulties began I was torn from my tight-knit community in Northern Virginia and forced to adjust to life in West Texas prior to the start of my freshman year. I struggled to regain the close friends and relationships I left behind for the first time in my life.

A place can be any position or point with space around. A corner, a site on the internet, McDonalds, or even if you’re lost in the woods you're still in a place because of the space that’s around. A place such as The Mexican Restaurant, where my parents go on special occasions or when I talked to a friend at The Baseball field about certain point of every aspect of the game we play, or even when My family was so traumatized when our dad went out onto the ocean when the waves we crashing in. He tells us he’ll be fine so he heads out on the sand and starts walking the opposite direction of us, the waves came in and crashed into the feet of the cliff. We thought he was gone but he came back and said the waves almost got him but he found a crack

There was cars passing by the trees outside of the metal chain link fence bases set up at every corner ,but it wasn't the happy feelgood setting, no it was the gloomy halloween setting this was my backyard on multiple very unfortunate days.

One summer’s day in 2014, I borrowed my neighbor’s lawn mower and met my teammates at the batting cage. I began mowing down the weeds, while they raked. Others restretched the netting back across the top of the cage. By the time the afternoon came we had a batting cage and a real sense of pride. From that day forward, we began practicing every day, year round. We talked baseball, walked baseball, lived and breathed the stuff. We shared our equipment and made do with what we had. We turned ourselves from a rag-tag bunch of misfits into a

Thus is the nature of baseball, a fickle game wrought with tradition, the foremost of which is the iron clad law mandating that the game is cruel and will take away as freely as it gives. My father always told me, “Baseball is a game of errors - the best hitters fail seven out of ten times - the key to success is knowing how to deal with the failure.” It is this aspect of the game, its want to frustrate and demoralize the player, that I think has driven most of my

It taste better than it smelt. It was still warm and so good, that when I finished I wanted more. But, I knew my mom would tell me no and that we can’t eat it all know. So, I just put my spoon away instead.

I finished making the tuna sandwiches and salad. I watched them chow down on the food.