Playing Fair and Being Kind

We’re in the second half of Baseball Season. I haven’t been to a game in ages. I might try to before I leave for New Mexico. I always pay attention to what is happening on the field. I learned to from the first days I ever walked onto a ball field. Baseballs are like rocks with leather covers and they can damage a person easily. Whenever the bat hits a baseball and players/coaches hear that cracking noise all eyes look for the source and all heads are up. It becomes second nature. Pay attention!

I wrote this story in one sitting but it has been inside my head, between my temporal bones for a few days. I hope you enjoy it and I hope your day is as lovely as this one here at The Castle. I’ve got Bill Evans and his trio on repeat. Peace.

R.I.P SID

Sid was a very bright man. He knew a lot about many things. In meetings, formal or not, Sid was a fountain of information and statistics. He read a lot of books, magazines, and newspapers. He was a serious conversationalist. Sometimes though he could be a little over the top. Sid could talk your ear off and then he was a pain in the neck. It was for this reason that not everyone liked Sid. Just get into any conversation with him and before you knew it the air was choked with facts, figures, and anecdotal information on construction methods, animal husbandry, astronomy, marine biology, who named the space shuttles, baseball, football, hockey, even rugby for crying out loud. Sid was an expert bordering on encyclopedic. In fact Sid used to sell encyclopedias door to door in the sixties. Maybe that is why he was so smart. He probably read all the volumes while he was driving around the neighborhoods drumming up business. I’ll bet he sold a lot of them. People would buy them just to get him out of their house. He’d talk their ear off.

I’ve experienced Sid on occasion. He hung out at the Red Cup Coffeehouse in Boothbay Harbor like a few of us regulars. We got to talking about boat building. He surprised me with his knowledge of Nathaniel Herreshoff and his boat designs. Sid could tell me, and I ought to know, how to caulk a wooden boat seam. We talked bevels and butt blocks for almost an hour. He knew his stuff. He could also talk about fiberglass boats and what constituted a good length to beam ratio for work boats versus yachts. I really enjoyed that conversation. Times though he would just yak on about stuff that was only interesting to him and really inappropriate for the moment. I think he had a need to explain stuff to prove what he knew and that he was important to human kind. I don’t know. I’m just guessing here so don’t take everything I say as gospel. But he sometimes would go on an explaining jag when you were trying to do something else and I think that is what caused his downfall. He was talking when he should have been quiet. Or at least he should have been paying attention while he was talking. Sid could never do those two things together though. Impossible.

Sid was at a baseball game in Portland with his son and his girlfriend. The son’s girlfriend I mean. They were watching the Sea Dogs play the Fisher Cats. Sid got into a long explanation of the curve ball; the dynamics of the spin, the seams of the ball, and the air pressures that caused the ball to move laterally. Sid should have been watching the lefty at the plate. While Sid was explaining the dynamics to his son, who by the way all ready knew this stuff, the lefty at the plate tried to hit an outside fast ball. He only got the very end of the bat on the ball. The ball spun off the bat in a wicked spinning motion like Bendix blender. There was a clink, double A ball uses aluminum bats, and then a whizzing noise like a power saw. The ball took off toward the third base coach who instinctively threw his hands up to protect himself. The ball though made a terrific left hand turn in a huge circle. You see the ball was spinning so fast that the air pressure on one side forced it to veer further and further toward the third base line seats. It was moving very fast and making that whizzing noise like a grass cutter.

The guys in the Fisher Cat dugout all lowered their heads as the ball tore past. All them had these wide-eyes looks. The ball continued over the box seats behind the dugout. The fans seated in that section ducked; a few began to reach up to catch the now-foul ball but pulled their hands back down for fear of injury when the thing came by them. That whizzing noise changed their minds about sticking any part of their anatomy in its way.

Sid and his son and his son’s girlfriend were sitting in the eighth row of Section 111. Sid was leaning forward to be able to see both of them while he was trying to impart the science behind the forces of a curve ball. He was making a twisting motion using both of his hands. With the left side of his head exposed to the ball field a second clink sounded at Hadlock Field. Poor Sid never saw the curving baseball coming at him. He didn’t feel a thing. The ball, traveling unimpeded at over a hundred miles per hour, struck Sid on the left side of his head where the temporal bone lies just above the ear. The temporal bone is rather thin and brittle. It covers the area of the temporal artery that supplies blood to parts of the brain. The baseball impacted Sid just forward of his ear and behind his eye. The ball crushed the temporal bone shattering the brittle structure into sharp bits which were slammed into Sid’s brain. The sharp bits cut blood vessels and in particular cut Sid’s temporal artery in many places. Sid was dead before he finished making circles with his hands illustrating the twist of the ball that just killed him. He not only explained the thing that killed him, he also demonstrated it perfectly. Poor Sid.

The irony of the whole situation is that for many weeks and months after people from all over who had been at the baseball game that day were able to explain in great detail and with great accuracy how Sid died. That is a legacy that Sid probably would want bestowed on him. Sid would have been proud don’t you think?

G. M. Goodwin 3 August 2016