March/April 2005

Going, Going, Gone

A ball sailed off the bat—and into history

by Larry Maddry

It was one of those small mysteries that are of no consequence in the grand scheme of things: like a summer polo shirt put away with others in a cedar chest in winter that isn’t there when spring rolls around.

Or a bottle of catsup you remember shelving in the refrigerator that has vanished months later when you look for it.

But each year when spring fills the senses with the scents and sights of earth’s grand renewal, I think about the crack of bats sending baseballs high into the air as professional baseball players begin their annual training camps down in Florida.

And then I think about the mystery of the missing softball.

Those who witnessed the softball’s disappearance are senior citizens now. But I recently talked with one of them on the phone.

He said, like me, he sometimes thinks of the softball’s disappearance when the air turns soft in April and wonders what became of it. It was the circumstances of the ball’s disappearance that made it so unusual.

If it had been stolen, or rolled into a sewer mouth on the street, no one would remember it.

I think I was ten when I got the softball. I do remember it was a birthday gift, a leather ball wrapped in tissue surrounded by a square box.

The ball nestled in the catcher’s mitt resting on a stack of Boy’s Life magazines at the bottom of an open bookcase in my room for weeks before coming into play.

The boys on our block and some neighborhood friends spent most of the day playing soldier, taking turns hiding in the tunnel with a tow sack covering the entrance we dug into Louten’s side yard.

It was late afternoon when the softball game started, after I ran up the stairs to my room to get the ball and mitt. I don’t know whether the bat belonged to Bob, or Obbie, or Louten, or our pals from up the street.

We used pieces torn from a cardboard box for bases laid down on the playing field that was Louten’s side yard. The outfield ended at Highway 301, which had little traffic at that hour of the day.

We played about four to the side with home plate about 10 feet from a barn with a pair of deer antlers nailed to the side.

I remember the smell of onion grass and a large pear tree to the left of third base in full bloom, its branches covered with blossoms as though a white cloud hovered over the trunk. The game had its usual arguments—squabbles over tag outs—caused mostly by the cardboard bases which were too small and slid away from the feet of base runners.

I don’t want to leave the impression I was a great hitter. I wasn’t. Several hits far longer than mine sailed off the bat on clothesline hits that struck the asphalt highway beyond the outfield and bounced into a neighbors yard on the other side.

But it happened during my turn at the plate. Louten was pitching and served up a soft one and I swung hard. The ball thumped off the bat and moved in a bowlike curve upwards over second base out to the highway just as a man in a hat—driving a black Chevrolet with windows rolled down—passed the playing field.

I ran a few feet toward first base then stood frozen in place watching as the ball flew through the back seat window of the Chevy and disappeared.

The car proceeded up the street with the man in the hat at the steering wheel never jerking his head around to see what had happened. He just motored away.

“It’s gone!” Obbie said, from his position in the outfield, clapping his glove on his head.

And it was. We all stood motionless wondering if the man in the hat would turn the car around and, after chewing us out—or worse—return the ball.

But he didn’t return. He simply drove up the highway as though nothing had happened.

The mystery we pondered for months afterwards was whether the man in the hat knew he had a ball in the back seat. Did he know the ball had sailed onto his back seat, knew he could use it and therefore continued driving, feeling it served us right for threatening highway safety?

Or was he totally unaware that there was a softball in the back of his car? Did he discover the softball weeks afterwards and say to himself, “I wonder how that got there?”

We also argued among ourselves over what the odds were that such an event could occur. Those of us who witnessed the astonishing event would reminisce about it years later—after we reached high school.

Obbie said you could hit the ball a million times trying to put it through the back window of a moving car and never do it.

That was so long ago. And it’s such a small, insignificant mystery compared to others. But when springs comes around and I drive past lots where kids are playing ball...I still think about it.