Great Moments in Baseball History

"STRIKE THREE!"

"That's not a strike, it was at my eyes."

"It hit the top of the strike zone!"

"The zone on the pitchback's just something to aim at. It has be in the strike zone when it crosses over the plate, and when it crossed over the plate, it was at my eyes. That's a ball."

"FINE, 3-2."

"That's right." I tap the bat on the plate, then stretch it out far in front of me, a move I've been doing since I was his age and saw Jim Thome do it. I come set, then flail wildly a pitch that would've been ball four.

(Jim Thome hit 612 home runs, but he also had the second-most strikeouts by a batter in Major League Baseball history, so my mimicry isn't totally off.)

"Alright, bottom of the inning. Who's up?"

We should probably be working with an actual baseball and the expensive metal bat that's sitting in his bedroom right now. Spring practices have already started for his rec-league team, he'll be facing live pitching in a couple of weeks, and he could use the reps. This isn't practice, though. This is our game, and we're using wiffle balls and a plastic bat.

"Freddie's up!"

He's obsessed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Some part of me would like to take exception to this, stake out a moralistic ya-gotta-earn-it stance against deciding to root for a team 2,000 miles from where you live that just so happens to be the best and most expensive team in baseball, but I know that's stupid. He's a kid, kids like to root for good teams, and my stubborn support of the team from a city I moved away from decades ago hasn't rewarded me nearly as much as his choice has.

Besides, there are worse guys to have as your favorite player than Freddie Freeman; he really does seem like a nice guy.

It's a shame that I'm going to have to strike him out.

"Strike one," I chirp, freezing him on a curveball that drops into the zone at the last second. I was never much of a baseball player as a kid, but there's certain powers magically acquired in fatherhood: I can pack the heck out of a car for a road trip, I can execute minor household repairs through the sheer power of cursing, and I can make a wiffleball dance when I need it to.

"That was at my eyes!"

"Fine. 1-0."

There's no arguing the next pitch, a wild swing and a miss.

"Daaaaad! I said no more knuckleballs!"

"1-1."

"No more knuckleballs."

"Fine, here comes the fastball." I sail the next one three feet behind his head, and he drops the bat, feigning like he's going to charge the mound. I've already told him about the time Robin Ventura charged at a twenty-years-his-senior Nolan Ryan, and how poorly that went for Ventura. As someone quickly approaching Ryan's age at the time, it's a story I hold more dearly with each passing day.

He's heard this story, and dozens of my other old-man baseball stories. When I stepped to the plate an inning earlier as Albert Belle–he has the present-day Dodgers as his muse, I have the 1995 Cleveland squad–he said "that's the guy with the corked bat, right?", and I was pleased that he was remembering the lore.

When I started effusing once again about how stacked Cleveland's lineup was that year ("we had 500-homer-guys batting 5-6-7, and not one of them was the best hitter on the team!"), he batted it back to me with a "yeah? why didn't they ever win a World Series?", and I quietly applauded his growing ability to trash-talk before unspooling a brief rant about the misfortune of facing future Hall of Fame pitchers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz in the World Series.

All the while, our game rolled on.

In The Sandlot (1993), the adult-narrator version of Scotty Smalls recalls the summer he spent playing baseball with his friends: "They never kept score, they never chose sides, they never even really stopped playing the game. It just went on forever. Every day they picked up where they left off the day before. It was like an endless dream game."

Our games aren't endless. This isn't a sun-drenched summer afternoon in 1960s California; it's a breezy school night in Kentucky, and he needs to take a shower before bed. We just need the right moment to end on, and it hasn't happened yet.

Freeman slaps my next pitch just over the head of the dog, who seems generally uncomfortable with our baseball games, but likes when we're out in the yard with him. He stays focused on his bone, and the ball dies in a stand of unkempt early-spring grass. I'm not chasing after it.

"What do we think, double?"

"Yeah, double works."

A two-man baseball game requires some judgment calls, and I'm not going to make any pretense of fielding or baserunning right after dinner. Under different circumstances, I might've argued it was foul, but we've just been given a five-minute warning, and this brings the winning run to come to the plate.

"Who's up now?"

"Will Smith."

"The hometown hero!" The Dodgers' catcher was born in Louisville, and went to high school a few miles from our house. We focus on this, and not the fact that he also attended the University of Louisville, a school neither of us particularly like. I throw one more knuckleball for the purposes of maintaining Dad cred–it earns a swinging strike, and more objections–but follow it with a slow, straight pitch over the middle of the plate. He launches it through the trees and over the back fence for a game-winning home run, just as my wife beckons us inside for the evening. He runs the bases for this one, with the dog trailing him and barking in shared celebration, looking a bit like the dolts that ran on the field after Hank Aaron's record-breaking 715th home run:

(He's heard that story, too.)

"Alright, kiddo, good game," I say, feigning anguish at my defeat. "We gotta get you to bed, though, you've got school tomorrow."

These games always feel like they're throwing off our evening schedule when they start, but feel far too short by the time they've ended. I'm just happy he wants to play with me, happy he's willing to endure another round of old stories.

"Can we play another tomorrow night?"

"Probably, but I've got some bad news."

"What?"

"You've gotta go get that ball."

–Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)