Man, those lazy days disappear like a ball hit too far into the woods.
The guy was twice my size, but I had to fight him. The bonehead insisted I was out when clearly I was safe at third. A crucial call in Wiffle ball was always worth scrapping over.

Conveniently, I don’t recall how the fight turned out. Whiffle ball fights tend to be quick and dirty. We dusted ourselves off, ignored our wounds and resumed the game. Another battle in one of those endless games involving a thin yellow bat and a plastic ball that actually makes a “wiffle” sound if you hit it hard enough.

Later you replace the plastic bat and ball with the real thing. You move to a bigger field and get more guys on each team. You expend all of your energy trying to smash that leather-bound ball with a wooden bat that you have to choke up on to grip just right.

For a while in a childhood, baseball means everything. It outweighs all other things in importance and provides escape from the other crap that comes with being young. Your batting average in Little League seems way more important than your grades, your appearance or your situation at home.

Years later, that same indulgent importance will be placed on a career, the stock market or some crazy addiction, but you don’t know it then. Not when you’re 5-feet tall and still collecting baseball cards. Not when you’re young and your biggest concern is emulating your favorite pro player’s swing.

Pay or run away

But you do get older, and the nature of the game changes. If you don’t go on to the college leagues or semipro, there are pickup games in vacant fields or empty lots. Now you’re a young adult swilling beer while you argue calls with your opponents. The ball sails farther and fights on the field get bloodier, but they don’t interrupt the game.

Baseball goes on.

The big, beefy guys might nail the ball too hard on occasion and a neighbor’s window gets smashed. You either suck it up and pool your money to pay for the damage or everyone jumps the fence and scatters, just like later on when you’re all grown-up and have to make adult decisions that demand you either run away or stay to pay the piper. Grown-up stuff.

And the grown-up stuff comes faster than any fastball.

Funny thing, childhood and baseball. You start easing away from it the way a bear cub eventually wanders away from his mother. Suddenly, you’re not out there playing every day. Suddenly, there are girls to chase and risks to take. Parties take precedence over childhood games, and you’ve gotta find a part-time job to pay your way.

Who has time or desire for pickup baseball when there’s a keg waiting to be tapped out in the woods somewhere? Who wants to practice a curveball when that cutie who just moved into the neighborhood has been giving you the eye?

Man, those lazy days disappear like a ball hit too far into the woods. Suddenly, you’re dating that cutie full-time and driving her around in a car. The part-time job becomes full-time, and you hardly ever see your baseball buddies anymore.

Suddenly, they’re younger

Then there comes a day when you notice something truly disturbing, something that shocks you into an unsought truth: All those professional baseball players you watch on the tube at night are younger than you are. Kids, really. Only they’re getting paid six figures to play a game you used to play just for kicks. They’re playing in ornate stadiums instead of the backyard, a Little League field or some massive patch of grass.

Most everybody has baseball fever right now. It’s not just the nuance and strategy and adrenaline rush of late-inning drama. It’s a glance back in time when all you really had to worry about was how you were swinging the bat and how you were fielding grounders.

Maybe that’s why vendors sell so much booze at pro baseball games. Because when you look out onto the field with groomed grass and precise, white lines, you tend to get reflective. You might get to thinking about a time when baseball was all that mattered and now, here you are. You’ve gone from whiffle ball to Little League and back-lot games and now you’re all grown-up.

You have a career and a family and you never really had a shot at playing baseball professionally, anyway. But for a time, you pretended. You dreamed of making that game-saving, diving catch while thousands of screaming fans leapt to their feet.

Me, I can live with the path my life has taken. But I’d give anything to get that old crew together one more time and see how we’re all swinging the bat these days.

Hell, I’d even take on that huge guy again if he called me out when clearly I was safe at third. I’ll bet he’s not so quick now, and he probably has bad knees.

And I’ll bet he doesn’t read this column. At least I hope he doesn’t.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.