“Everything That Was Supposed to Move Didn’t”

  As I plodded through a St. Louis winter flurry, trudged into the gym alight with a low orange glow, and began to run my ten laps upon the rubber track surrounding the three basketball courts that comprised our winter practice area, I felt the cheeseburgers cooked on the Foreman Grill, the countless hot wings, and at least one beer start to stir in the pit of my stomach.  One thought raced through my mind: Please God, let me get through this practice without throwing up.

For as long as I had been a part of the Washington University in St. Louis Division III baseball program, the threat had always been there.  You never know , coach would say, we might have practice on Sunday .  We would respond, but coach, the Super Bowl is Sunday .  He’d kind of chuckle to himself, you never know .  This year, the hammer dropped.  Word had come down that we’d be starting practice at 8 pm on Super Bowl Sunday.  We begged, we pleaded, we demanded that our captains do something.  It was all in vain.  Forget the social aspects of a Super Bowl party, coach figured that by 8, the game would be mostly over; football season would be over; and we would have shifted our focus back to baseball.  As I plodded through a St. Louis winter flurry, trudged into the gym alight with a low orange glow, and began to run my ten laps upon the rubber track surrounding the three basketball courts that comprised our winter practice area, I felt the cheeseburgers cooked on the Foreman Grill, the countless hot wings, and at least one beer start to stir in the pit of my stomach.  One thought raced through my mind: Please God, let me get through this practice without throwing up .

At WUSTL, in order to fit forty or more games into mostly Friday, Saturday, and Sunday doubleheaders, the game schedule typically runs from late February to early May.  In St. Louis, however, winters rarely end by February 28.  When we returned from winter break in mid-January, team practices would start up in full force, but barring a miracle of Global Warming we would be relegated to training indoors.  Last summer, I wrote a piece describing the unique character of a typical Division III team , but our winter practices possessed a quality all to themselves.

Upon walking into the gym that, from 12 pm to 3 pm on weekdays and from 8 pm to 10:30 pm on Sundays, transformed from basketball courts and an indoor track into a baseball training facility, one thought always jumped to the front of the pack: between the yellow lighting and somewhat off white paint, aren’t the walls the same color as the ball?  Those first practices always arrived with the unmistakable energy of anticipation.  A new season was beginning, whatever happened the year before now lived solely in the past.  Everyone standing under that orange light, trying to shoo away the professor dressed in a white T-shirt, short shorts, thick goggles, and high white socks, who simply would not give up his pick-up game of basketball, had a common purpose: win 30 or more games.  According to pitcher Trevor Young-Hyman, “it was always just that excitement about playing baseball again. I would always [screw] up my arm because I wanted to be throwing 100% right away.”

Winter practices were an exercise in individual work ethic as well as frustration.  Pitchers, infielders, and outfielders all had their own routines.  Pitchers ran, threw bullpens, hit fungos, and did fingertip push-ups against a wall.  Infielders ran, hit off a tee, hit in the cage that dropped down from the ceiling, and fielded the aforementioned fungos.  Outfielders ran, hit, and imagined what fly balls might look like once we got outside. Pitcher Tim Heaven recalls, “The best compliment I ever got from coach was in the gym (it took 4 years)- Freshmen year-‘Keep the bat out of Heaven’s hands’; Senior year-‘Tim, you’re really not that bad with fungos anymore’.”

Before we could begin, though, we had to set up the gym.  Mats had to be moved, wooden mounds had to dropped, L screens and pitching machines were moved into the drop down cages.  “Indoor practices make your clothes extra staticy,” said Matt Knepper, “Things that are not supposed to move, like the mounds and first base, did; things that were supposed to move like pitches and ground balls, didn’t.”

Between bullpen sessions, infield practice, catches, batting practice, and hitters working off the tees, the orange gym was always alive.  At any given moment, ten or more baseballs were in flight.  The THWACK of a wooden bat connecting with a rubber, dimpled ball permeated the gym.  Mis-thrown baseballs and 50-foot curveballs echoed as they smacked against the ecru walls and caromed off into unexpected directions.  Infield work was made all the more interesting when the third baseman would throw across our makeshift diamond behind the backboard of a low-hanging basketball hoop.  Every once in awhile, a ball hit at just the correct angle would skip under the netting of a cage or the curtain dividing the gym between batting and fielding practice and turn into low-flying, shinbone-seeking missiles.  Conor Kenney, whom coach referred to as Conway Twiddy throughout his tenure at Washington University, writes, “a missed ground ball would bounce off the wall and hit the infielder in the ass, back, neck, or head… funny to the pitchers – not so funny to the gently bruised infielder.”

Ultimately, because practices mostly ran through the early afternoon, players operated on their own schedules, fitting in their training around their class schedules.  One of my teammates, who typically led the team as both an offensive and pitching force, would always wander into practice ten to twenty minutes late, sipping soda from a waxed paper cup and munching on potato chips.  “We had practices in the gym?” another teammate half jokingly replies.  Winter practices comprised a plethora of individual challenges: simulated bullpens, hitting games, pitchers “making bets on how many steps left or right we could make the infielder go with each swing of the fungo,” and finally trying to duck out for class before practice concluded and we had to return the gym to its original state.

With pitchers and catchers reporting in less than a month, we all have our signs signaling the coming of the new season.  For some, it’s TBS showing the movie Major League.  For others, it’s the first time Baseball Tonight returns to ESPN’s schedule.  For me, it’s always the Super Bowl.  I flash back to that snowy Sunday night in St. Louis, where I spent two hours hitting grounders that predictably took three hops before bouncing into a fielder’s glove, hoping that my shins would be safe from any number of low flying missiles, and doing my best not to puke.

One indoor practice, when two teammates entered the gym looking like Johnny Damon circa 2004, Coach Lessmann deftly assessed the team’s chances, “We should be pretty good this year,” he chuckled, “We’ve got Jesus Christ at third and Abraham Lincoln at first.”