Cross-Legged Catch

Forgive me if I'm a little rusty, but I thought I would share this with you. I'm not a "hero" person, but I do have a lot of love and admiration for lots of people.


Cross-Legged Catch
By Ron Bishop

In one of the countless sports-related books I read when I was meandering through my teens (usually when I should have been reading a school-related book), I learned that Hank Aaron, baseball’s all-time chemically unenhanced home run king, batted crosshanded when he played in the minor leagues.

So for a right-handed batter that means the left hand, instead of the right hand, is on top as you grip the bat. If you have a bat handy, try swinging with your hands in this configuration. It feels like trying to cast a fishing line while wearing handcuffs.

But my grandmother somehow threw cross-legged.

She was a widow who lived alone in a stately and often dusty one-bedroom apartment in South Orange, New Jersey, a 40-minute New Jersey Transit (then Erie Lackawanna) ride from New York City. She and my grandfather were married in June 1935; my father, Ronald Jr., was born two years later. Grandpa (Ronald Sr.) died in 1938. They weren't much for original names.

“Dee Dee” moved into her apartment on Prospect Street about a year later, and lived there until, after falling several times, she was dispatched in 1986 by my parents to the Green Hill Nursing Home for rich Presbyterian women. A bout of Christmas guilt caused my Dad to move her into our house for a while after a few months at Green Hill, but their dark sides, and Dee Dee’s deteriorating physical condition, caused him to send her back.

“I keep going,” was Dee Dee’s stock greeting, one that served her well from 1938 until she died in 1989. While most memories of youth are inaccurate, and often embellished, I swear she said it at least a dozen times when my brother and I would pay her weekly Sunday visits during which she tried to teach me things as an adolescent I would recognize only upon becoming an adult, and after making a few truly questionable decisions that would have left Dr. Phil scratching his pencil-eraser shaped head.

To say that Dee Dee was a sports fan would be a stretch. Her allegiance was divided between the golfer Arnold Palmer and the well-known preacher (and sometime anti-semite and racist) Billy Graham. Billy was in to her for God knows how much money in small contributions. But it was golf – in the blood of northern New Jersey blueblood wannabes – that was what today's magazine and newspaper writers would half-gloss over, half-dismiss as her “passion.” A new tournament every week – a new chance to see her beloved “Arnie.”

But that was the extent of her emotional involvement in sports. My dad was even less interested, which limited my interaction with him to a few forced "I love yous" during short car trips to the churches whose pipe organs he serviced. He recalled going to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (Ebbets Field, Dad!) when he was a kid to see the Dodgers play. Louise, Dee Dee’s housekeeper and longtime friend, would take Dad to the games while Dee Dee worked as a secretary for the obstetrician, Dr. Gulick, who would deliver both me and my brother.

I’d like to see all of you “It's a Small World” players top that.

While Dad would tell me how boring these trips were, I was entranced, enchanted, mesmerized. At the time, I was developing a strong love for the New York Mets. My fourth-grade teacher, a kind, somewhat spindly man named Herman Gerdes, wheeled a massive beast of a television monitor into our classroom so that we could watch the Mets play day World Series baseball against the favored Baltimore Orioles in 1969. A few months later, Mr. Gerdes taught us to sing "Silent Night" in German. The following spring, it was off on a field trip to a local Christian radio station.

After school during that glorious week in October, I ran as fast as my prematurely tall and somewhat portly (the word used by the guy who ran the menswear store in my hometown) body would allow in order to catch the last few innings. When Cleon Jones, who became my favorite player until he was caught with a woman (not his wife) in the back of a van during spring training, caught Davey Johnson’s fly ball to seal the Mets’ victory, I was hooked. And so was Dee Dee.

I eventually forgave Cleon Jones – his picture sits on a shelf in my office.

The Chuckles -- a gooey, teeth-rattling candy whose dense sugar coating looked like flakes of cubic zirconia -- that she would leave on her hallway table turned into baseball cards. That table now sits in the entryway of the home I share with my wife and son. Dee Dee soon gave us locker-like boxes (one green, one red) in which we could store our cards. The boxes had a slot for each team, arranged top to bottom in alphabetical order.

And she started playing catch with us – from April to October – in the parking lot behind her apartment building.

Our asphalt forays in no way resemble the full-blown, overpackaged, overgeared, overplanned, overorganized sports experiences only sometimes enjoyed (I hope) by a lot of kids today. It was me, my brother, who would rather explore the cars in the lot (foreshadowing driving experiences he began racking up at the ripe old age of 12 in my dad’s 1976 Chevy Nova), and Dee Dee -- in her dress and low heels, which always matched the purse she would carry on to our playing field. When the weather was cooler, she would don one of several Republican cloth coats. This is my homage to former President and head paranoid Richard Nixon, not hers, although since she was a lifelong Republican, I'm sure she would approve.

My glove, even when I was 12, was too big for her arthritic right hand. I should mention that I’m right-handed, which means that she wore my extra-large glove on the wrong small hand every Sunday. Mimicking the Mets pitchers whose exploits she would memorize during the week to share with me, she would slowly, but elegantly kick up her leg – her left leg – and throw the ball to me with her left hand. Think of a giraffe trying to dance in a gust of wind.

Even though I was a kid, and all kids make fun of their grandparents – usually during insecurity-driven assertions of independence around friends – I never once made a snide comment about her throws. Five years later, during high school, and thus automatically more cool than I had been, I became frustrated when she nudged us so often to come and visit – that’s another story. But as a fat, sports-starved prepubescent boy, I was thankful – yes, thankful – that she played catch with me, even as my brother wandered the parking lot, making a mental list of the cars he would eventually buy, disassemble, and wreck.

“How do you do that?” I would shout to her in admiration as I caught her remarkably accurate throws. OK, so I was also probably trying to prolong the play, but it was the one place I could throw and hit without being judged by peers who thought that, at my size, I should be able to crush the ball, throw it hard – and tackle and check ferociously.

All that mattered was that I was playing baseball. She knew Dad hated sports and wouldn’t let me watch games on our new color Admiral television set - one she helped him buy, by the way. So we’d pull out her small rickety snack tables, set them up near the couch and her favorite wingbacked chair, make some Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese, breathe in air tainted by decades of Alpine cigarettes Dee Dee would smoke, and watch the games.

But only after we played some cross-legged catch.