Get your mind out of the gutter!
Where I come from, shagging is not a thing done to Austin Powers by spies. Instead, it is a time-honored hallmark of baseball practice, wherein several players stand in the outfield grass and track down balls hit by their teammates during batting practice. It is also, if you asked me during my high school days, the worst.
Usually, during high school practices, shagging balls was one station in a larger rotation: your group would start at home plate for batting practice, then move to the outfield to hit golf-sized whiffle balls, then spread out to shag. Of all possible rotation stations, shagging balls was without doubt the least challenging, most boring, and always felt like the biggest waste of time. It also seemed unfair: why should I have to stand out here collecting baseballs for 30 minutes when I, personally, only got to hit for five minutes! Viewed through the eyes of a teenager (or worse, a child: shagging baseballs as a practice activity extends into the far reaches of Little League), a half-hour tracking down balls in the outfield felt like unjustified jail time. If you were lucky, you could spend it with friends, but if Coach yelled at you to split up, all of a sudden you were in solitary confinement.
Of course, looking back on this activity (and how I felt about it) reveals my youthful self-centeredness: batting practice is simply not possible without players shagging balls in the outfield. Unless your school can afford an enclosed batting cage (ours couldn’t), there is no option but to spend some of your own precious time wasting away in the outfield. When your team has few material resources, you’re forced to rely on human resources, and to “waste” time doing something for the good of the team. And when you’re in your teen years, doing anything for the good of a larger group seems stupid and wasteful. After all, Call of Duty isn’t going to play itself!
Under most circumstances, I wouldn’t be thinking about shagging balls at this moment in my life. I probably would have forgotten about the activity altogether, at least until I have children of my own and am regrettably forced to send some of them into the outfield during batting practice. But shagging is on my mind because it was the absolute best part of my day yesterday, and I did it on the very same field on which I learned to hate it.
Yesterday, I took part in my alma mater’s first annual alumni baseball game. All in all, the entire day was a treat: I saw some old friends; I met many fellow alumni, most from graduating classes far removed from my own; and, most importantly, I played the sport I obsessed over for the majority of my childhood. Most of my skill has sloughed off over the years, but my love for the game has not faded. I still spend many a summer evening tuning into games on television, marveling at how human beings can track (and hit!) a tiny sphere traveling faster than 90 miles per hour. (To deepen my appreciation for this: in my only at-bat yesterday, I struck out against a high school pitcher. Any delusions I’ve ever had of hitting major-league pitching quickly scurried away.)
But without doubt, the most enjoyable aspect of the alumni game was the hour I spent in the outfield before the first pitch, collecting baseballs while the current varsity baseball team took batting practice. It was truly wonderful: for sixty minutes, I ran freely across the expansive astroturf (it was dead grass when I graduated in 2012), I practiced tracking down fly balls off the bat, and I threw the balls to the open gloves of complete strangers, people with whom I shared nothing in common save for our alma mater and love of baseball. I worked alone, patrolling right-center field, making it my personal mission not to let any balls get past me. It was relaxing, it was liberating, it was everything shagging balls wasn’t when I was a teenager.
What changed? Most obviously, I have a new appreciation for things I took for granted as a kid. Even the most mundane aspect of baseball practice is a treasure to me now, as I no longer take part in baseball practices of any kind, save for occasional trips to the local batting cages. On another level, I wonder if I now have an appreciation for group activities, and for playing roles in those activities that allow the activity to take place at all. Whole-field batting practice is impossible without a small army of outfielders to bring the baseballs in for another round; to be one of those outfielders is to help facilitate something larger than yourself. Baseball is notoriously the least team-oriented team sport, but the act of shagging balls during practice establishes a sense of synergy: by doing it, you’re allowing for an activity that is much more than the sum of its individuals.
I’ll admit, there were times yesterday when I regretted signing up for the game. Striking out has always made me want to crawl into a hole, and swinging and missing several times during batting practice didn’t help matters either. But you’d better believe I’m already counting on signing up for next year’s game, if only because I know I’ll have the opportunity to stand in the outfield for an hour, breathing in the fresh air, stretching my legs as I sprint across the turf, and getting a small taste of the game I miss dearly.
December 22, 2019
Riverside, CA
Unsolicited Essays 