Let's play two

Every now and then, you just have to follow the lead of one Ferris Bueller, who took an infamous day off from school some 27 years ago.

Matthew Broderick said it well in his title character from the 1986 film: “Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Ferris went to a baseball game on his "day off."

Maybe it's because I've recently read Marty Appel's book "Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain," and Jane Leavy's "The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the end of America's Childhood," but for whatever reason, I decided that today was one of those days to stop and look around.

After all, how many 65-degree days do we have in January in southern Ohio?

Not enough. (Global warming notwithstanding.)

Today's mission was simple. The Boys of Summer were going to make a rare winter appearance.

Colin and I grabbed our baseball gloves and headed to our homemade ballfield.

Granted, winter rules were in play, much like on your local golf course. Fly balls stuck where they landed like 9-iron shots hitting a too-soft green. Players replaced their own divots.

After an hour or so of long-tossing, Colin got down in the standard catcher's crouch, signaling for a fastball from the Old Man. Roughly 60 feet to the east, I stood on the makeshift rubber. I nodded, thus accepting the catcher's request.

The pitch delivered was a perfect strike.

"Eighty?" I asked.

"Maybe 50," the catcher replied.

With an 0-1 count on the imaginary hitter, the next pitch was, in the words of erstwhile Major League catcher Bob Uecker (don't call him Mr. Belvedere), juuusssttttt a bit outside.

"Seventy-five?" I asked.

"Less than 50," came the response. (We were talking miles per hour, for any non-baseball fans reading this.)

After another fastball that I swear would have topped 65 on the radar gun, I had the hitter at a ball and two strikes. I shook off the one-finger salute and the deuce. Colin knows that three fingers has nothing to do with the agave plant (think tequila) and everything to do with my famous circle-change.

From behind home plate, he put down three digits.

In my best Luis Tiant impersonation, I delivered. The windup started slowly, with a purposeful look toward our imaginary centerfielder (in my mind, it was Clarence Brabson III playing center at the old Whiteoak ball diamond with the tree in right-center).

With left leg raised (every bit of a foot or two), I followed through.

Strike three.

"Forty-five?" I asked.

"Maybe," the catcher said.

The catcher was kind.

Then, it was my turn to crouch down as we reversed roles. The new pitcher was a lot better. The new catcher wasn't.

He topped 70 with relative ease.

Thirty minutes and several short-hops later, the chatter turned toward the number of operations guys like Johnny Bench and Carlton Fisk have had over the years.

"I think Johnny Bench has had about a half-dozen hip and knee replacements," I said, with both legs bent at the knees and grimacing just a bit with each return toss.

"Just how many hips and knees does he have?" the young pitcher inquired, with a bit of a humor in the rhetorical question.

So maybe there was a bit of hyperbole in the original estimate. Call Ron Luciano or Jocko Conlon and have me ejected already. Please. Call the Gator, too, and have me hauled back to the house.

Catchers wear the tools of ignorance for reasons not fully understood by anyone who hasn't caught a game of baseball. For those of us who have caught a game or two of baseball, we like to point out the fact of the matter is that catchers often make the best managers.

Colin is too young to have watched guys like Mantle, Fisk, Munson or Bench. They all were good, though.

I saw all of them play, too, the last two in person at the 1976 World Series in Game 2 at Riverfront Stadium. (Munson batted .529 in that Series, but the Yanks lost in four straight to the best all-around baseball team I've ever seen.)

One other thing, the game-time temperature on that October evening was around 25 degrees in the first night-time weekend World Series game in MLB history. (Jack Billingham beat Catfish Hunter.)

It was a lot warmer, however, on this January afternoon at our own field of dreams.

As Ernie Banks would say, we should've played two.

Just one more pitch. Just one more at-bat. Play ball.

Rory Ryan is publisher of The Highland County Press and was often told by Coach Dick Shaffer that he wasn't very good at baseball.