Up-tempo Eagles

This is probably my favorite thing that I have ever written. Every four or five years, I bring it out and rewrite it, stirring up warm memories of one last innocent and happy spring before I entered adulthood. It’s been a long time since I shared this piece, so hopefully it will find many of you for the first time. Thanks for reading. -Matthew

When I was a 17 year old homeschooler, I enrolled at a school with a funny name. It was Christian High School, located in the suburbs of St. Louis. It was a new high school, one that had apparently been named during a fit of minimalist zeal.

I was the starting center on the basketball team, which sounded like a big deal unless you knew that there was no backup center. Despite being a gangly 6’7” tornado of elbows and knees, I fancied myself the gravest of defensive threats. This was more or less true, in a technical sense: in our tiny classification it was common to play against schools that had no tall players. I thus tallied a great deal of blocked shots when 5’11” post players would pivot and hurl the ball directly into my armpit.

When the hoops season ended, I was somewhat baffled by the resounding lack of scholarship offers coming my way. I had calculated, incorrectly, that scores of major programs would be looking for 180lb centers who averaged 9 points a game. Just as I was contemplating dropping out and finishing my schoolwork at home, I was informed that I had to pick a spring sport. This came as a surprise to me.

“I don’t know how to play anything but basketball.” I told the athletic director.

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “You’re a boy and we don’t have enough bodies.”

For reasons that must have seemed important at the time, I chose baseball.

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It seemed a small detail that the school had never had a baseball team before. Or maybe they had. There were uniforms, kind of. Not enough for a whole team, and not in our school’s colors, but they definitely had numbers on them, so we had that going for us. Had there been a previous team? Our questions were swept aside, because there was no time to dwell on the past, because we were about to build a baseball dynasty, because we wanted it more than all those other schools that already had a team, or something.

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For some reason, Christian High School had seized upon the idea that the one thing preventing them from a surge in enrollment was the lack of a baseball team. Well, that was easy enough to fix. Tryouts were announced for the spring, and the school immediately began to market the new baseball program to prospective families.

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On the first day of tryouts, I drove over to the local park after school. CHS did not yet have their own diamond, so all of the practices would have to be held at public locations. On that first day, seven boys showed up. There were no coaches to be found. Between us, we had six gloves. We milled about on the base path, kicking at the dirt and talking about girls as the Missouri sun fell across the outfield. Finally, out of boredom, we practiced throwing each other grounders, because that’s what the Cardinals did when they warmed up before games.

You would think that this would have been warning enough. You would think that we would have suspended the team right then and there, and the next morning informed the administration that this fool’s errand would not go any further until equipment, coaches, and adequate numbers of players could be found.

But this was 1999. It was Varsity Blues and it was Edwin McCain playing in our heads every time we looked into the mirror. We were the tail end of Generation X, writhing around in fits of earnestness and trying to feel everything at once. There was no time to think, man. There was only time to be, like, epic.

On the second day of practice, we stood around that same infield as the same Missouri sun set over our heads, wonderfully oblivious to all common sense. This time, we held a contest to see who was the best at catching line drives barehanded. It looked so much cooler if you didn't even use your glove.

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Eventually we scraped together the minimum number of players for the maiden season. Our squad was a motley group of athletes culled from the other sports teams, plus random boys at the school who happened to own cleats. The outfield typically consisted of myself (I didn't have cleats, but I could spit pretty well), my best friend Andy (who would come the closest to hitting a home run, because he hit a ball that rolled almost to the fence), and a boy named Brian, who had actual muscles. We were coached by a carousel of volunteers, mostly fathers from the school who had coached baseball, or played baseball, or had watched baseball at some point. From practice to practice the coaching staff turned over and over. One coach would leave for a week while another would show up for practices but not for games. And then there was another whose sole contribution the entire season was a speech about wearing protective cups.

There was also the small matter of hitting. The school did not have catcher’s gear, so there was no way to practice full speed pitching or hitting at the park. It was okay, though, because someone tracked down a former student who now went to public school. This guy was the key, you see. He owned catcher’s equipment, and the school agreed to pretend he still went to CHS and let him play on the team if he would bring his equipment to practice and be the catcher.

Meanwhile, Andy and I had devised a plan to give ourselves an edge.

By chance, we both knew a man who owned a local training facility with batting cages. The man had agreed to give us free use of the cages to train for the upcoming season. Andy and I spent hours in the slow pitch cages, pinging the big yellow softballs into the netting and slapping each other on the back afterwards. We had been told that we had great cuts, whatever that meant, and yes, both of us were starting to see it now: we were definitely natural sluggers. The girls at school were going to be amazed at our displays of precision hitting once the season began. At no point did we step into the fastball cages, though. Those were WAY harder to hit.