The Time I Was Nearly Killed by a Baseball

This may come as a complete surprise to you, but I was kind of a nerd when I was a kid. 

(I know that didn’t come as a surprise at all; I just wanted to feel better about myself.)

I loved reading. When I wasn’t playing outside, I was reading, which I preferred. But my parents would make me go outside, especially in the summer, so I could get some sun and vitamin D and avoid getting rickets.

And then I would lose track of time, and my parents would call me home by standing at the door and flipping the pages of a book.

But when I played outside, I loved to play street baseball. This isn’t the romanticized version of stickball that kids played in New York by yelling, "Hey, youse guys wanna play stickbowl?"

This was four kids playing with regular bats and tennis balls, so we didn’t put a baseball through a window. I lived on a dead-end street, and we would only get a car every 10 or 15 minutes, so it was a great place to play. It was a long and narrow field where sliding into second was guaranteed to peel off three layers of skin.

It was usually the three younger kids — two neighbors and my sister — versus me. I would toss the ball up, hit it, and then run the bases: a tree in my yard, a frisbee in the middle of the street, a tree across the street, and then home plate.

You could throw out a runner if you threw the ball between him and the base without nailing him in the head.

Technically, if you did hit one of them in the head, they were safe, but only because they would cry and their mom would hear, so it was just better to give them the base, even though they were clearly out by a mile. Big babies.

Plus, it was just a tennis ball. It’s not like getting whacked with a regular ball, which happened to me.

There was an empty baseball field three blocks away at the other end of my street. Duck between two houses, and there was a hidden baseball field where I would play with my friend, Michael, and his big brother Jimmy.

Now, I liked baseball, but Michael and Jimmy loved it. None of us neighborhood kids were very good, but Jimmy was. He had played in high school, plus he had a mustache at 16 years old. He could hit any pitch you threw, rocketing it out of the baseball field. To be clear, he was hitting pitches thrown by a 12-year-old, so it’s not like he was facing big league pitching. But it was still pretty impressive.

One day, I was pitching, Jimmy was batting, and Michael was in the outfield. I threw the ball as hard as my skinny 12-year-old arm could manage, which I’ll admit was not that hard.

I used to run alongside my pitches just to admire them.

But this time, I was determined to strike him out. The count was 2–2, and I needed one more strike. I reared back, whipped my arm forward, and let it fly.

It was perfect. It shot straight down the middle and hung right over the plate, in line with the fat part of the bat.

Jimmy connected, and it sounded like the crack you’d hear in a baseball movie where some washed up big leaguer is given a second chance at a career in the minors, but is on the worst team in the league, except now they’re in the last inning of the final playoff game, and our washed-up big leaguer needs to score a run or some rich fat cat will close down the community center and a kid will die of rickets, so the washed-up big leaguer hammers the ball and sends it over the outfield fence and his team wins, the community center is saved, the kid gets better, and the guy’s wife comes back, plus he’s offered a new big league contract.

It sounded like that.

Have you ever heard a ball move so fast that there’s a faint whirring sound, as the seams churn up the air around it as it flies?

I heard that sound briefly before it nailed me on my left thigh. Followed by the sonic boom of the ball’s flight.

I collapsed to the ground and rolled around in more agony than I had ever felt in my twelve years, including the summer before, when I broke my arm, or the summer before that, when I broke my collarbone.

My first thought was, "My God, I’ve been shot!" until I realized it was worse than that.

I writhed in pain as Michael and Jimmy stood over me, trying not to laugh and telling me to rub some dirt on it. Meanwhile, I worried that my femur had been shattered and that I would walk with a permanent limp. 

I had a bruise on my leg where you could even see the seam of the ball, and it hurt to walk for about a week.

Which gave me plenty of time to stay inside and read.

My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.