It’s important to understand that, at the time, I was a real Jesus freak.
Most of the guys on the team hated this about me. I can’t say I blame them. I was a staunch, proselytizing evangelical who preached Christ through concussion. I routinely ruined the boys’ nights out, guilt tripped them about affairs with cleat chasers, and tongue-tisked their crude male vitriol.
I was a party pooper, pure and simple. A party pooper with a 10-pound Bible who made a life of following Jesus look about as enticing as a frontal lobotomy.
I was on the team, but not part of it. But I thought that was okay because I didn’t answer to the team. I answered to the Almighty, which is why when my team told me I needed to obey the player code and bean a player on the opposing team in retaliation for them hitting one of ours, I said no.
“Jesus wouldn’t want me to hit someone,” I said, sitting at my locker, arms folded defiantly across my chest while my teammates made their appeals for vengeance.
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” They fumed. “If Jesus were a baseball player, he’d play the game the right way! He’d slide cleats up. He’d break up the double play. He’d truck the catcher. And he’d sure as hell bean a guy to protect his teammates.”
I had my doubts that these players really knew what brand of baseball Jesus played. After all, these were the same players who got robbed by prostitutes in Vancouver. The same ones that got into a fist-fight after it was confirmed the middle infielders had turned a double-play with an outfielder’s sister. The one same that broke into the home stadium’s concessions via an air duct, served unlimited rounds at the team’s expense, tried to walk home annihilated, and then passed out in a kiddy-pool of some local’s front yard.
I guess, looking back, I should have been happy I had them talking about God at all. But honestly, I didn’t much like the guy the other team hit. He was my teammate, sure, but I thought he deserved it, the cocky SOB. He showed up or popped off more than I felt a player ought to.
It was only a matter of time before another cocky show-off took offence at his antics and drilled him. In fact, that’s exactly how we found ourselves in this situation — two big egos showing off at their team’s expense: prophecy fulfilled.
The ball was now in our hands, specifically mine as I was about to make my first career start. I was already nervous without this need for a player code reckoning. I wanted to let it go, but my teammates had taken a mob mentality. They wouldn’t be satisfied until they had blood.
When I called them on this irrational, dangerous thinking, they countered by appealing to my own irrationalities, saying, “Come on! You’ve been a hyper-religious douche all year Hayhurst. Now it’s time to do right by your teammates. Think of this as an evangelism opportunity. God wants you to do this!”
Preposterous. Insane. No rational Christian man would ever think injuring another player was a way to facilitate salvation.
Of course I believed them.
Once I told them I’d do it, they loved me. They promised they’d come to Baseball Chapel the next Sunday. Then they told me that if I got charged on the mound, not to worry because they’d be out there, cleats sharpened, fists flying, ready to deal damage before the batter ever made it to me.
I worried anyway. I’d never beaned a guy on purpose. I’d never been in a brawl before. I’d never started as a professional pitcher before! I should have been going over hitters’ hot/cold zones. Instead, I was being told, “Throw your glove at him when he charges, don’t trip over the rosin bag and make sure you punch with your left hand.”
“I don’t want to have to punch anyone,” I said. “I’ll bean a guy, but no punching. Jesus doesn’t punch.”
“Fine, then run towards first base,” they countered. “We’ll do the punching.”
The sun came up on the day of the start like the raising of a guillotine. Ironically it was a noon game, mid-week and Kids’ Day.
Local junior summer camp children flooded the stadium, 6,000 or so, in little tribes marked by colour-coordinated t-shirts that ran the full spectrum of the rainbow.
The children took their places, blurring together like a giant bowl of marshmallow rich cereal. Their tiny, saccharine voices unified for a brief chorus of Sponge Bob Square Pants. Attending mothers beamed, pointing at players, talking about role models, integrity and the shape and form of childhood dreams realized.
Meanwhile, I took the mound with my shadow stretching long across its baked, red dirt. I dug in, heart racing, hands shaking, praying for God to grant me the strength to drop a certain minor league showboat with a steaming fastball to the kidney.
I took my first sign, rocked into my windup and uncoiled down the mound…
The thing about hitting a batter is you have to work yourself into the right situation to do it.
You have to know before you uncork the bean ball that even if the guy you’re going to welt comes around to score, it won’t hurt you.
This means you have to have control of the game. Hitting a guy is supposed to send a message of dominance. It’s an act of bravado as much as it is any real code enforcement. In fact, that’s what the code is when it comes right down to it — a set of rules built around respecting masculinity.
If you’re cruising, if you’re in control, you can drill a guy and act like you don’t give a damn because you own him and his team. That’s where the real insult is. Like money to burn.
If you’re not in control, you’re just going to start a fight, or set yourself up for some serious backfire. Hit a guy and win the battle, but if he scores and costs you the game, you lose the war.
Or, if you’re like I was that day, wild with no idea where the ball’s going from the start of the game until your incredibly quick and embarrassing implosion, hitting a guy simply looks like a logical outcome considering how badly you suck. It makes you look weak and pathetic, flailing for survival. I was all of the above.
If Jesus were a ballplayer | Read Part I Here
I did hit someone. I took me five pitches to do it, but I got it done. That was the worst part, that I was trying to hit a batter and couldn’t.
I actually missed him so badly, I threw a strike by accident.
When my manager made it to the mound to pull me, he had no words. He’d never seen anything like it. The better part of a hundred pitches, a handful of them to the backstop, the game out of hand and one enemy batter slightly grazed — and not even the guy I was supposed to hit.
The manager snatched the ball from me before I hurt myself with it. By the time I made it back to the dugout, not only were we losing, we weren’t in any kind of situation to show anybody how masculine we were.
I’d given the opposing team all the power, which they took full advantage of, drilling our boys. All series long, we’d chirped and squawked at each other, daring the other to come fight, but no one did.
Today was supposed to be the day and I was to lead the charge and I blew it.
“Jesus, Hayhurst. One job. One (expletive) job and you couldn’t get it done,” said the same angry group of players that had told me God wanted me to hit a batter.
In anticipation they spent the entire morning before the game talking about grappling techniques, takedown maneuvers, and jujitsu throws.
“I’m sorry, guys,” I said. “I tried my best. I was nervous.”
“He was nervous?” they mocked.
They called me a series of names that make for scandalous headlines when written in eye-black, and retracted their promise of attending Baseball Chapel.
I was embarrassed. I was mad. Mad at myself, mad at my team for talking me into playing assassin, and mad at God for hanging me out to dry.
But the game wasn’t over.
In the ninth, down to our last at-bat with our catcher up and the game lopsided in favour of the opposing team, the enemy pitcher uncorked a bean ball: a parting shot, a sign of control.
The ball bored into our catcher’s shoulder with a heavy, dull, thud. Then it fell straight to the ground, followed by the bat, and our catcher’s helmet.
Our catcher, a former champion two-sport athlete (baseball and wrestling) mule-kicked the opposing team’s catcher and then charged the mound. He deflected the enemy pitcher’s glove, chased him off the back of the mound and shot under his awkward left-handed jab, taking his lead leg and toppling him in process.
The crowd roared at the ensuing chaos. The voices of 6,000 panicked children rose from startled confusion to screaming panic to nauseous gasping when the knuckles of our catcher flattened the nose of the enemy pitcher, sending blood squirting freely out after each subsequent blow.
Normally, the pair would have been separated long before blood was drawn. But this fight had been coming. It was a five-game series and this was the fifth game.
The fire started in Game 1 and had kept building. My team had all but gone through the opposing roster making matchups according to weight, size, and fighting style. They wanted this. They needed this.
When the fight broke loose, both teams came charging from their dugouts like Braveheart. No one tried to separate anyone. It was a not a brawl, it was a battlefield.
Half of the bullpen ran into the infield to join the fracas taking place there. The other half chased the opposing team’s outfielders around the warning track, screaming and promising death as they charged.
The opposing team’s Latin infielders stayed in their dugout and threw baseballs at our boys. Our coaching staff choke-slammed one of their coaches. The guys keeping score for us hopped the fence in their street clothes and started hitting anyone they could get their fists on.
The first basemen, the guy I was supposed to run to if I got charged, got sucker-punched and hit the ground like a wet sock. I bent to check on him as a fastball from the opposing dugout went zipping over my head.
Then a pair of Oakley sunglasses pinged off the side of my face, after they knocked off the head of the guy who sucker-punched the first baseman, who now had been sucker-punched himself.
Cops were on the field now. They’d split some of the players up but there weren’t enough of them to prevent all the fists from landing. In fact, they seemed to break up the knots of players trying to prevent fights just long enough for more players to get hit.
Finally the cops grabbed the coaches and got the truly bloodthirsty to calm down. The relievers stopped chasing the outfielders and the suppressing fire from the dugout ceased. The adrenaline stopped and the hum of battle lifted and in the void came the sound of crying children and screaming mothers and, suddenly, without any reason or provocation, the satirical tone of SpongeBob SquarePants.
We were escorted back to our lockers by the cops. As we marched across the outfield grass, we were booed forcefully. The formerly beaming mothers now sermonized about what terrible examples we were setting.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves!” screeched one mother, holding the sobbing head of her son against her thigh.
“(Expletive), lady! And get your son a tutu,” said our now conscious first baseman.
We filed into our locker room outside the stadium. A cop was placed at the door to make sure we stayed there. Then, sealed in, our manager told us to shut the hell up, shower on the double, and get our asses on the bus. We did as told.
Rolling in silence, the bus took us out of the city and down the highway. Our manager instructed the bus driver to take the next exit. We rolled off the interstate and pulled into a local gas station. Our manager stood from his customary seat in the front and gestured to the pitching and hitting coach to exit. After they shouldered past him, our manager stood in the aisle and looked us over.
“Don’t any of you even think of getting off the bus,” he said before exiting himself.
In their absence, the bus flooded with war stories. Who hit who. How hard they hit ‘em. Whether blood was drawn. Who we still had to hit the next time we locked horns.
Then a guy with a black eye looked at me and asked, “Hayhurst, who’d you hit?”
The bus went quiet as faces of the team turned to me, awaiting my answer. I swallowed.
“I didn’t hit anyone,” I said as the bus murmured in disgust and revulsion.
“But,” I added, “I did swipe a sick pair of sunglasses!”
I held up the deluxe model Oakley sunglasses that had bounced off my face in the brawl.
“If you can’t hit ‘em the face, hit them in the wallet, right?”
A cheer went up, but it was snuffed out instantly as the coaching staff returned to the bus. The manager led the way holding a white styrofoam cooler filled with ice. He sat it down and popped the top off. The following coaches both carried two 24-packs of cheap, domestic beer.
They dumped the cans into the coolers and tossed out a couple rounds to the hooting boys.
“You earned this, boys,” said the manager. “You went to war today. (Expletive) those guys! They don’t push us around. We taught them to respect the (expletive) game! We showed them dirty mother (expletives)!”
The sound of roaring and chest beating set to cracking beers muffled the turnover of the bus’ diesel engine. Soon we were on the road again. Music was playing. Boys were talking macho.
“Hayhurst!” yelled one of the players who told me that God wanted me to fire the first shot. “Drink this,” as he held out a beer. “It’s a great evangelism tool. We’ll all take you more seriously if you do. God would want you to!”
I looked at the beer, then looked at the player holding it out to me.
“No thanks,” I said. “I think I’ve done enough of God’s work today.”
I put on my new sunglasses, reclined my seat, and let the bus take us back home, now as part of the team.