BULLSEYE!

by D. Brent Sauser, AIA
July 6, 2021

Baseball!  I love baseball.  At least I really did as child.  The Angels were my favorite major league team, with the Los Angeles Dodgers coming in a close second.  I used to know all the players on most of the teams, their strengths and weaknesses, and who the best pitchers and sluggers were.  I saw Sandy Kofax pitch.  I was there when Don Drysdale pitched his 56 straight shutout inning against the Montreal Expos.  I attended the 1964 All Star game and saw the great Micky Mantle, Karl Yastrzemski, and watched Dave Winfield play left field, and Reggie Jackson play right.  Harmon Killebrew was there, along with the best pitchers from the American and National Leagues.  Years later I saw Jim Abbott, the one-handed pitcher, lose a one-hit extra innings game 1-0.  Tough loss.  And who could forget the amazing Nolan Ryan?  I loved watching him strike out batters one after the other.  So many wonderful memories of baseball I can’t remember them all.  Suffice it to say, it occupied a lot of my childhood growing up time.  I suppose it could be a lot worse.  Even in my early married years, I recall taking the family to Angel games and enjoying peanuts, hot dogs, and leaving during the sixth inning because it was past their bedtime, and the Angels were usually losing.

I spent a lot of my free time playing catch with my best friend Randy Dearth.  I learned to throw with my left arm ever since the operation to my right arm in third grade.  I was doing everything right-handed prior to that.  I recall one afternoon I was shagging balls in left field when the coach asked me to throw the ball home.  I threw the ball as hard as I could but as I did, I doubled over in terrible pain while grabbing my upper right arm.  The coach didn’t know what to do, so he sent me home to shake it off.  It wasn’t long after that I fell backwards during recess with my right arm behind me.  I could feel it snap as I hit the ground.  That started a rather long process of doctor visits, tests, and a million x rays.  Turns out the bone of my upper right arm was gradually decomposing.  Eventually, it would have broken under its own weight.  I needed surgery.  It was all very hard for an 8-year-old to understand.  They ended up taking bone from a place called the Bone Bank and repacked my upper arm.  It took several months to recuperate, and I had to be watched by a neighbor during school time, because my mom had to work.  While my right arm was in a sling, I practiced writing cursive with my left hand.  I was dreadful.  But I kept at it and eventually rose to the level of barely readable.  That was how I ended up a “lefty”, an unnatural southpaw.  I threw left and batted right, an odd combination.

Once I was cleared to be a “normal” kid again, I called my friend Randy and started to learn how to throw left and catch right.  It was grim at first.  My aim was not good, and my catching ability wasn’t much better.  I made the determination that I would need to practice more, by myself if I had to.  We lived on the corner and had a chain link fence on the street side to keep our German Shephard (Eric Von Sauser) in the yard.  The fence dividing us from our neighbor was a concrete block wall about 6 feet high.  We had an ample supply of baseballs thanks to the various little league teams practicing nearby in the school yard.  They would occasionally foul a ball into our backyard. Eric served as our growling deterrent to anyone silly enough to want to fetch the ball.  A little leaguer would come around to our front door and ask us to get the ball for him.  My sisters would oblige the request, but I would tell them to go get it themselves, the gate was unlocked.  Hence, my bag was full of spare baseballs.

I drew a circle representing the strike zone on our neighbor’s concrete block wall.  I would then walk to the other side of the yard and start throwing, not that hard at first, just to get the feel of throwing left-handed.  I would throw hard enough that the ball would roll back to me, allowing me to also practice my fielding right-handed.  This would go on for hours day after day.  Practice may not make perfect, but it does make for improvement.  It got to be second nature for me to throw left and catch right.  Occasionally, however, I would throw wild and end up tossing the ball over the fence into our neighbor’s yard.  It was on such an occasion that a bad idea resulted in an even worse outcome.

I remember it was late afternoon, prior to dinnertime, and I was out back throwing the ball.  I happened to throw wild into the neighbor’s yard and went after it.  I found the ball and turned to climb back over into our yard.  Before doing so, I heard my sister, Karen, call me in for dinner.  I couldn’t see her because the block wall was 6 feet high . . . and I wasn’t.  I stood close to the wall on the neighbor’s side while Karen called out again.  Then, a thought crossed my mind.  A terrible thought.  I wondered if I could throw the ball over the block wall and hit my sister, sight unseen.  I mean, what were the odds of that happening, right?  So, I threw the ball based on where I thought I heard her voice.  Next thing I knew there was a nasty sounding thud and then Karen began screaming, running back into the house.  My first thought was, “Wow, I hit her, I really hit her!”  My next thought was “RUN!”

Somehow my mother didn’t see the “experimental” aspect of what I did.  All she saw was Karen’s grand spanking new shiner in her right eye.  Mom was mad and angry.  I got the belt for it and I suppose I deserved it.  Experiment notwithstanding, it was a stupid thing to do even if the odds were not in my favor.  I guess the moral of this story is that even a blind man can hit the bullseye once in a while, but better be ready to face the consequences.