The summer of 1980 was my last summer before becoming a teenager. My little league team won our town's little league championship that summer. Things like that are epic for a 12 year old. My best friend on the team was Billy "The Goo-man" Googins. Billy and I celebrated by camping out in his back yard, drinking Mountain Dews all night and making fart noises under our arms. Billy played right field for our team and was our worst hitter. He was extremely afraid of getting beaned by a baseball. He was so terrified by getting hit that he would partialy duck out of the batter's box every time the pitcher released his pitch. Occasionally he would get a base on balls, but over the course of the season, he did not get a single hit. Still, our team won our town championship which meant that we were invited by Creve Coure (the small town five miles north of us) to play against their league champion.
Creve Coure was a stinkhole of little town with a population of 5,500, almost twice that of our town. My mother made me roll up the windows in the car whenever we drove through Creve Coure because the stench from a local factory was so disgusting. The houses in Creve Coure were cheap, the schools were cheap and the alcohol was cheap. But their little leage baseball team was always tough. Creve Coure's champion team was coached/managed by Kim Humphries, a t-shirt wearing, 30 something year old unemployed bartender or something. Each year Humphries collaborated with the other coaches in Creve Coure to stack all the best twelve year olds onto his team so basically his team was the All-Star team of Creve Coure. Since Marquette Heights didn't host an All-Star tournament, Creve Coure would just invite our town's champion to play a game against Humphries team each year. Our Marquette Heights team had lost to Creve Coure eight times in a row and now this year they had some six foot tall mutant 12 year old pitching for them, "Lightning" Rod Blander, who reportedly threw the ball over 85 miles per hour. There wasn't an 11 or 12 year old around who could hit the bastard. The only problem was that Blander had control problems - he was always beaning the shit of kids. There were rumors in fact that he had actually hospitalized kids and even put a kid into a coma with one of his wild fastballs.
Billy "The Goo-man" Googins was petrified of the prospect of stepping into the batter's box against this mutant, and he confided in me that he was having crazy nightmares in which he was being chased around town and being pelted with baseballs by a bunch of six foot tall mutant 12 year olds. Billy's father, 'Old Man' Gooman I called him, looked to me to remedy the situation. I was the first baseman on our team. I joked around a lot, was relaxed on the ball diamond, and prided myself on my clutch hitting. Old Man Gooman became my biggest fan earlier in the season when I broke up Dennis Tuttle's no-hitter in the 7th inning by lining a double off the center field fence. Dennis Tuttle's dad just happened to be Old Man Gooman's supervisor at a local factory. After that, Old Man Gooman was in the stands every game, right behind our dugout, keeping a score card and updating player's stats with each pitch. Every time you'd look up, there he was with his calculator, figuring out some stat. He never did any coaching, but he was always hovering around the team practices as if he was part of our team.
After winning our town championship, our team had four days to prepare for the Creve Coure game. We held a practice each day. On the last day of practice, as Billy's turn for batting practice came, Old Man Gooman called me over to the side of the dugout.
"Say," Old Man Gooman smiled at me. "You know how important this game against Creve Coure is gonna be, don't you?"
"I think so," I answered.
"Well, we have a little situation with Billy, you know. I mean, he's an adequate fielder, but... we are going to need every advantage we can get against that Creve Coure team," Old Man Gooman explained.
I looked over at Billy, whose batting helmet seemed two sizes too big for him. Our coach threw him a soft pitch and Billy instinctively stepped backwards.
"Son, you're a team leader," Old Man Gooman continued. "I realized that when you knocked that double off of Dennis Tuttle to break up his no-hitter."
I nodded.
"Now that's what you have to do here. You've got to take charge. Be a leader."
I looked over my shoulder at Billy again, slouched there and inched backed into the very farthest corner of the batter box.
"That means that you got to do something about Billy," Senior Gooman continued. "You gotta make sure he gets his head back into this game - you're the only one he'll listen to."
This last bit was true enough. I could talk Billy into nearly anything. I guess that's why he was my best friend. One time I had gotten him to throw a marble-sized spit wad at our school librarian, Mrs. Martz, that landed right in her ear. Then another time I put him up to pouring Drano into the aquarium in Mr. Ozog's Science class - causing the genocide of an entire school of exotic fish. So I nodded in agreement with Old Man Gooman as he revealed his plan.
"There's only one way to get Billy over this phobia - and that's for him to face his fears head on," the old man explained. "What you're gonna have to do is stand his scrawny ass up against a fence, put a ball bat in his hands, and get a bunch of your teammates to pelt him with baseballs!"
I did a double take at Old Man Gooman.
"Do it," he grimaced at me and nodded as though we understood each other. "It's the only way."
And that's when I realized his crazy sumabitch was out of his mind. Yet one thing about his plan did make sense. Billy had to get over his fear of getting hit by a beanball. That night, Billy and I took our customary late-night bike ride around town and I explained to him how he was going to have to get over his fear.
"The first time you come up to the plate," I explained to him, "You're gonna have to lean into one of Lightning Rod's best fastballs."
Billy obviously didn't like this suggestion. His eyebrows made a 'V' as he looked at me. His lips tightened.
"Get beaned intentionally," I continued, "that way you'll get over your fear of being hit." I popped a small wheelie to accentuate my point.
"Plus you won't have to worry about getting beaned again, because you know there's no way you could get beaned twice in the same game...by the same guy."
Such is a twelve year olds line of reasoning. But my skills of persuasion only marginally prevailed as on the day of the big game Billy showed up with an expression that teetered between stoic determination and utter horror. In the dugout I offered Billy a wad of ABC gum for good luck as we watched Lightening Rod in his pre-game warm up. Lightening Rod was every bit as menacing as we could have imagined. Even his wind up was intimidating. He would rock back once, then twice, then kick his left foot out violently and without even looking at his target he would rear back and then let her fly with a snarl, that seemed more fitting for a demon than a human. The ball zinged through the air in a blur and exploded into the catcher's mitt with an deafening WHACK with each pitch! Billy jumped from fright with every explosion.
"Just lean in to her," I consoled, giving him a wink for encouragement. "It'll just sting for a second."
---
As testement to him being the worse hitter on our team, Billy batted last in the order, which meant if Lightning Rod was pitching well, then Billy he might only have to face him two times the entire game, the third and maybe the fifth or sixth inning. But instead Billy came up to bat in the very first inning. Lightening Rod was already beaning everyone in sight. He was trying to throw the ball too damn hard and was absolutely out of control. His coach came out to the mound to give him a few words of encouragement, with the hopes of calming him down, then WHAM! The very next pitch was a dart right in the middle of the next batter's shoulder blades.
When it came time for Billy to step up to the plate, there were two runners on base - both had been beaned. Larry LePew was on third base, he had gotten whacked in the elbow and was holding his hand over a huge welt that was swelling up like a grape fruit. And Davey Wolfson had gotten it in the ankle and was hobbling around second base on one foot like he had shit in his shoe. Any illusion of confidence that Billy might have mustered up before the game was now completely gone. He timidly approached the plate, like a man walking toward the electric chair. As always his helmet was way too big and loose, so that he resembled one of those wooden Bobbleheads whose head bobs up and down.
I clapped my hands from the dugout and gestured to Billy: 'Just lean in to her' I motioned. Billy tiptoed into the batter's box like an old lady dipping a toe into a tube to test how hart the water is before she slips in. Before Billy even looked up at his demon, Lightening Rod impatiently rocked back, kicked, grunted and fired. The ball rocketed out of his hand at over 85 mph and Billy didn't even have to worry about leaning in to it - it was heading right for his head. Billy froze, the deer in the headlights, as the ball whacked up upside the ear hole, cracking his helmet in two and knocking the Gooman out cold.
The bad news for Billy was that he had to be taken to the emergency room and treated for a concussion. But the good news was that Marquette Heights beat Creve Coure in a landslide 11 to 3. And when the last out had been recorded and we received honorary trophies, Old Man Gooman drove me to the hospital, where we gave Billy his trophy. Since Billy hadn't even had to lean into the Lightening Rod fastball, I didn't feel any responsibility for his cracked head. Yet when I walked into his room and saw him there, spread out on the hospital bed with a peach-sized bruise on the side of his noggin, he looked up at me as if it were all my fault!
