August 8, 2006

I think I may give up journalism and become a professional baseball player.

No, that doesn’t mean I’m coming home. And no, that doesn’t mean the annual intestinal invasion I’m currently fighting off has caused me to revert to being an 8-year-old.

It means that despite my inability to hit or catch and throws rivaling Chuck Knoblauch’s when his Yankee career ended, I have the potential to be an all-star second baseman in the Yaoundé baseball league.

What? Baseball in Cameroon?

I was invited to play softball by a friend who is starting up a digital recording studio in Yaoundé. A person attached to the US Embassy runs a game, and since so many people were out of town, they needed an extra person. So at first I thought I was going to be playing with the Marines and some members of the embassy staff. I was a little concerned about standing in the way of the shots the Marines stroked, but Dennis told me they can’t hit. I thought that was part of basic training.

On Sunday, a friend from the embassy picked me up and we drove to the field, in the shadows of Yaoundé’s main football stadium, the Omnisport. When we got there, Tad looked at the dirt that was meant to stand in for grass. “Nice field,” he said.

“It’s a lot better than the fields I played lacrosse on in high school,” I said. “There’s no broken glass or syringes.”

Tad told me Cameroonians played, but I took this to mean a few attached themselves to the American softball game. I was wrong. There was one team taking batting and fielding practice, decked out in pinstriped shirts and black leggings. Someone in Korea donated the shirts – they had the logo of the LG electronics company on the left side, numbers in the 60s and 70s and the names on the back were written in Korean characters. They all wore matching red caps and had a coach who reamed them out for every mistake.

A second team, most of them wearing yellow, non-matching shirts and mismatched caps, were sitting on the bleachers, messing around. Some of their players – both teams had men and women – wore green football jerseys and most of them, but not all, wore a hat of some kind.

In Cameroon, the rules of baseball are still the same. It’s still three strikes for an out, four balls for a walk and three outs to an inning (which I believe they called an attaque). A full count is a balle de match. The bases are still around 27 meters apart (90 feet) and the pitcher’s mound is still just under 19 meters (60 feet) from home.

There were ratty old gloves and ancient metal bats with little or no rubber grip. Two rubber bases were laid out at first and third, with a proper second base bag in between, and there was a rubber pitching slab.

An umpire stood behind home, decked out all in red – pants, helmet, mask and chest protector. He stood with his hands crossed in front of him for some reason and had clearly heard the caricature voices of umpires in the U.S. He had just the right gravel and theatricality in his voice when he called “strike” and the appropriate melancholy when saying “ball.” His strikeout calls were gleeful; his “walk” had a slight hint of mourning to them.

But the ump had an African stoicism missing from American umps. He took a solid shot in the nuts on a foul tip without even flinching. He just stood there and said “foul ball.” Yes, he was wearing a chest protector that covered the area, but I’m sure he wasn’t wearing a cup. Even in their suits of armor, an American ump would have been hobbling up and down the first base line for a few minutes after a shot like that.

The original plan was for the American team to take on the Cameroonians to give them some practice before the opening of the season on Aug. 20. But for security reasons – there was a club football match and some genius thought it was a risk for Americans to be in the area – the embassy team didn’t show. It was just Tad and I.

So Tad went with the Cameroonian equivalent of Earl Weaver, the longtime, unhinged manager of the Baltimore Orioles, and I went over to the Bad News Bears, in their appropriate yellow.

We were up first. Earl Weaver, who was around my height and a bit broader, was doing his Randy Johnson impersonation. Both Tad and I were expecting a leisurely game of softball, so we were a bit surprised at the heaters this guy was unleashing. I was also a little unnerved at how wild he was. In French, a “heater” is a chauffer I think. I never learned how to say “chin music”, but I certainly learned how to get out of the way of it.

I originally put myself into right field, not wanting any part of actually playing the field. That’s always where my coaches hid me in the mighty New Rochelle Youth Baseball League – the kind of league with no try-outs. But since no one took second base, I moved up to what was my position at the end of my baseball career and with the Riverdale Press softball team. Earl Weaver had his team running on everything. Each person on the other team stole second and, when the catcher bounced the throw over me and the shortstop that had only learned baseball within the last month didn’t back me up, would take third. Eventually I told our pitcher, Blaise, that all he needed to do was look at the runner to keep him on first. But the first baseman never held the runner on, so it never worked. We’re learning.

Our third baseman, Tindang, didn’t know that you had to tag the runner at third if it wasn’t a force play. So he’d stand there with the ball in his glove and have the runner beat by 10 steps, but the runner would be safe. (Bec didn’t know what a force play was, so for those of you who haven’t wasted your lives watching the Yankees, a force play is when a runner has to run. Only one runner can be on a base at a time, so if a runner is on first, he or she is forced to run on a ground ball. The same holds true if there is a runner on first and second and less than two outs and there’s a grounder. The runner on second has to go to third. Now, if there’s a fly ball….And we wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t pick up baseball as their national pastime.)

As I said, we’re learning. Tindang was in his fourth week of playing.

Since I stopped playing organized baseball after eighth grade, and only started playing softball in college where we discovered the beautiful mix of softball and beer, I forgot one very important fact about baseball. It’s boring out there in the field. You stand there, and even at second the ball rarely heads your way. You can switch from foot to foot. You can draw lines in the dirt. You can tap your glove and scream all the chatter you want (they didn’t teach baseball chatter in my French classes), but it’s boring. It’s a lot more fun to watch because you can get up, go to the bathroom, buy a hot dog or change the channel if you’re at home. You have to stay out in the field if you’re playing.

I went one-for-three on the day, including a walk and a contested triple in the ninth with the game out of reach. I sent a deep shot to right that I actually thought was going to make it to the street – there’s a short right field wall – but it landed a few feet short. I watched it all the way in. It landed on the line and then rolled. I didn’t really start running until I saw it land after I had turned at first. The ump called it foul. My team called it fair. Earl Weaver called it fair, saying it rolled foul. The right fielder, Tad, said he didn’t see. Coward. They compromised and put me on second.

We got crushed. Mostly because the other team didn’t stop the stealing even when the score got to be something like 17-2. I tried to explain to Blaise that the appropriate thing to do in this situation was to send a pitch inside at Earl Weaver or to drill him in the ass. But somehow, “Mets-la dans son derriere” just didn’t have the right force to it.

Does anyone know how to say, “to plunk” in French?