Christmas came early the winter before my seventeenth birthday. By then, I could hardly even remember what it felt like to actually believe in Santa Claus. Still, if I had a single wish, I would’ve asked the holly-jolly fat man for the one thing I wanted more than any other: to be on Johnny Richardson’s nighttime winter hitting camp selection list.
* * *
I worked hard that fall and built upon a strong finish to the summer season. I’d grown stronger, gotten faster. I just needed a chance. A spot with Johnny would give me some serious momentum. A spot with Johnny would build a foundation for the coming season, a season that held my future in its balance. College offers, pro scouts, the draft—all of those things were within reach. I had to perform, though. I had to keep up my gains and become even sharper at the plate. With Johnny’s help, I’d do that and more.
Johnny Richardson’s nighttime winter hitting camp was a right of passage. It meant you were on the cusp, ready to be something. Getting the nod to work with Johnny was the first step toward big leaps. He was a difference maker, a madman when it came to hitting: part physicist, part magician. Johnny took good hitters and made them great, and he helped great hitters rake, flat out.
My name had to be on his list. It just had to be.
* * *
For reasons unknown, Dexter Allen was lurking about up at Parson’s at a quarter-after-nine on the second Tuesday in December. He was there in the hallway just as Harlan Dietrich posted the list for Johnny Richardson’s nighttime winter hitting camp. Dexter, who was strung tighter than a harpsichord, checked the list, ran down the hall to the payphone, and called me.
“Yo, Tyne!,” he shouted before I even had the receiver fully to my ear. “You’re on the list.”
It took me a moment to process what Dex was on about. He got worked up over everything.
“Tyne!” he exclaimed again. “The list—Johnny’s list—you’re on the winter camp list. Dietrich just hung it up.”
The list, I thought. Johnny’s list. Had Dex,I wondered, just been camped out at Parson’s waiting for it?
“Jesus, Tyne,” Dexter uttered. “I mean, what the fuck?” He’d grown impatient, having expected me, I guess, to be as excited as him. I suppose I was, but it sometimes took a few extra beats for my brain to catch up to the things going on around me.
“Nah, yeah,” I stammered. “I’m stoked, man.” The motor in mind shifted into gear, and my brain accelerated. “For sure, for sure,” I followed. “Are you in, too?” I asked.
“Fuck yeah, I am,” he replied. “Me, you, Hunter, Price, Harp, and a few others. It’s gonna be jacked.”
“Definitely,” I said. A sudden knot tightened in my stomach. “It’ll be all-time.”
But just like always, I raced past my own excitement, past Dexter, beyond the telephone receiver and its curly brown cord, and became ensnared in thoughts I tried like hell not to think: What if I fucked up? I wondered. What if I just couldn’t make it happen? Questions swirled like dirty dish water around an open drain: What if. . .? What if. . .? What if. . .?
* * *
“Look,” Johnny Richardson barked at the start of the very first session. “If you hit— you’ll stick.” His pale-blue eyes ranged our nervous faces. “If not,” he added, “well, we don’t really need to talk about that.” Johnny’s scorched voice held more power in a whisper than mine did in a full-on scream. He sounded like he’d spent years eating broken glass and handfuls of gravel, his throat wrecked from shouting the same four words over and over and over again: Ride the line! Replace!
Johnny played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the mid- ‘80s, a latecomer who tugged at the tail of the famed Lumber Company. People who knew him—really knew him—called him JJR because for the first few years of his career, Fleer printed the name Johnny Richardson, Jr. on all his baseball cards.
“I ain’t no Junior, though,” he said one time as we swatted open-sides to the opposite-field gap. “Dunno where they got that shit.”
JJR stood for Johnny Junior. It’s always the silliest, seemingly trivial things that stick. Nicknames are no exception. It’s crazy to think of the things people let go of in favor of those they keep.
* * *
JJR knew hitting from the inside-out. He’d probably forgotten more about baseball than all of us, collectively, had learned about the sport. Salt-and-pepper hair licked out from beneath the pine tar-stained Midwest Cardinals hat he wore each and every day.
“Find the slot, Tyne,” he growled time and time again. “Ride the line and replace, replace, replace.”
There are five absolutes to hitting a baseball effectively, and I think JJR believed in those absolutes more than he did the reliability of the sunrise or the force of gravity.
I knew what he meant when he barked those things my way; I knew them every single time: The front elbow finds the slot as a hitter moves out of their load, then it gets replaced by the back elbow after the front hip clears and makes space for the back hip as it turns. It’s funny, really, how folks—even folks who know—call the hitting motion a swing when it’s more of a turn. The swing is almost an accidental by-product, a simple attempt by the hands—via the bat’s barrel—to make contact with the baseball.
“You gotta make space—stay connected,” JJR added. “Turn behind your barrel. Any of this,” he said as he smacked at my collapsed elbows—elbows that crowded my turn and prevented my hips from getting through, “is robbing your power. Movements like this are all arms. You gotta turn from the ground up: anchored, balanced, athletic. And,” he added, “much, much more violently.”
I knew what JJR was after and could picture it exactly, but my ability to execute the movements, time and time again with consistency, was somehow compromised. It drove me crazy. With each passing session, I grew more and more frustrated, which fueled my fear. Maybe, I thought, I just didn’t have it. Maybe baseball didn’t have me in it.
* * *
“Come on, now,” JJR chirped the Tuesday after Christmas. “Learn from your reps. The ball,” he insisted, “will show you things—its path, the result. If it’s not what you want, then you’ve gotta adjust.”
It didn’t happen right away. Hell, I’m not even sure exactly when it happened, but eventually I got out of my own way. Eventually, I figured out how to both listen to and actually apply what I was told. I wasn’t consistently able to do so, but I was consistent enough. Of course, being consistent enough is a lot different than simply being consistent, and I longed for the latter. But longing is for crushes, diets, and desperation; it has no place in the real world.
***
Two days after New Year’s, we were up at Schmidt’s running through a series of drills JJR designed to help us get comfortable with letting the baseball travel.
“Let it get deep,” JJR barked. “The pull side is dead, all clogged up.” He pointed to what—on a real diamond—would have been left-and right-centerfield, imaginary gaps that stood at the end of the tunnel. “You gotta work gap to gap. Everyone,” he continued, “is so goddamned pull happy these days.” He stared at us, silent for a moment as he dug a chunk of sunflower kernel from between his teeth. “Outs,” he muttered. “Pull-happy outs.”
* * *
By early February, I saw measured improvement; my swings were stronger and more effective. But JJR wasn’t satisfied. He knew I had more.
“Look,” he growled. “You gotta hold the 90. This here—“ JJR said as he grabbed my forearms just above the wrists and pushed them toward my biceps. “Up, up,” he continued. “C’mon now.” His brow furrowed, eyes narrowed like turret slots. “Make the goddamned adjustment,” JJR rattled. “Let the ball’s path teach ya.” He shrugged and reset my tee. “Can’t just keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result. This, Tyne,” he added, “is what separates the have-gots from the don’t-gots.” JJR exhaled. “And worse,” he continued, “the never-will-gets.” I watched as he stepped out of my cage. “If you ain’t got it, fine. If you got stuff to work on—well, that’s everyone. But don’t pretend. Don’t fucking fool yourself.”
I learned more from that lesson than perhaps any other with JJR, which is saying something since what I learned during that winter nighttime hitting camp leveraged me around a corner I didn’t even know existed. I learned that to be successful, I had to trust myself more than I thought was possible. I had to counter-intuit—to stay connected and inside the baseball, to turn rather than swing. JJR helped me unlearn much of what I’d taken as scripture when it came to hitting a baseball both consistently and effectively. It’s amazing how many people walk around confidently teaching, speaking, and preaching things they actually know very little about. Great harm can come from pure intentions, I suppose, and misguided efforts breed desperately unfortunate results.
* * *
I’ve been thinking about JJR quite a bit lately since replacement has become an unexpected norm in my life. As my son, Will, grows and develops, old versions and aspects of him are replaced by new ones. He’s 13 and as obsessed with baseball as I was. He’s confident in a manner that seems foreign, yet perfectly natural to me.
I remember, vividly and immediately, so many aspects of Will’s former selves. I can still hear his cries as a baby, his babbling gurgles as they caromed off the bedroom ceiling in the early hours of the morning back when he was only barely a dozen months old. I can still feel his tiny hand as we crossed streets, as I spotted him climbing at the park, and as I guided him while he learned to skate as a three-year-old. I know his face as he stood in his first-ever baseball uniform an hour-and-a-half before his first-ever game. I recall the shoes he wore and his flat-bill Yankees hat as he scrambled across The Meadow in Central Park, and I remember the way his hair fell matted and sun-kissed over his forehead as I zipped his wet suit before those very first waves on the south side of the pier at Venice Beach. I remember all of this and so much more. My efforts to preserve the memories of all the former Wills I’ve known and loved are plagued by anxious uncertainty. Those younger, former Wills have darted away from me, replaced by someone new and quite different. I worry about how far away my memories seem and how the distance continues to grow. I’m terrified of losing them—or worse—losing track of my son.
* * *
In his office—or what served as his office—JJR hung a quote over the door jamb. It was only visible from the inside, but once a person saw the black metal frame that bordered the words: We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be, they couldn’t help but think about what those words meant. The quote came courtesy of Jane Austen, snatched from a book I’ve still not read, and if JJR wouldn’t have been such a bad ass, we probably would’ve made fun of him for having a quote by someone as soft as Jane Austen. Of course, we were kids—and assholes—confused boys too foolish to know that Jane Austen wasn’t soft at all and that the quote that hung above JJR’s door jamb might have been the most important thing he ever said to us even though he never said it at all.
Thirty-three years after I first saw it, that Jane Austen quote JJR framed still rings true. I am the best guide I could ask for, especially when it comes to being there for my son. After all, I figure that’s all he really wants or needs: for me to show up and be me. But, much like him—though not nearly as rapidly nor gracefully—I’m regularly being replaced by a new version of myself. My most desperate fears orbit around the notion that the best guide—the me that Will wants and needs—might be the one that just got replaced.
And so I madden myself trying to memorize moments. I’m driven to capture Will—to freeze what he is before he becomes what he’ll be. It’s easy, I tell myself, as easy as it is to memorize the air.
