Out of His Mind

Out of His Mind

Matthew C. Borushko

He realizes that he has been making a list, a list of them all, his greatest plays, a phrase, greatest plays, that conveys, he thinks, the fact that he is aware of the absurdity of the idea, of using the superlative “great” to modify “plays,” those moments—only a handful—from among thousands of moments of a youth defined by baseball, defined being a word to consider carefully, which he does and then decides it works, because even if the why and the how are elusive it remains that these, these plays, and so little else, are what he goes to, what he possesses, on those occasions when a memory is called for, when, that is, he thinks of himself in the past, including the relatively recent past, since, if he’s being completely honest, this list extends into the softball leagues of his twenties, where he continues to play, somewhat anonymously, avoiding the post-game drinks and season-end cookouts, playing for reasons initially obscure to himself, having signed up as a single player and been placed on a coed team comprised of the staff from a MGH pediatric unit, a mix of doctors, nurses, therapists, office staff, some of whom, quite serious about winning, seemed to consider themselves fortunate to have landed, through the league’s random assignment process for singles, an athletic new guy, a guy who played ball as a kid, who happened to be the assistant coach of the frosh baseball team at a private school out in Newton, and who was there not to make friends or to meet girls or guys but to win and, it would start to become clear, to figure something else out during those Thursday night games on the Esplanade.

One play he’d put on the list is a catch he made, out in left-center, a running catch on a ball hit high in the air, a ball he’d needed to run hard for from just behind second base, where he, as rover—the tenth fielder this league allowed, a position he liked for the freedom it gave him to analyze a batter and anticipate where they were most likely to hit it—had positioned himself. The ball was hit and he remembers turning right and running hard into left field, finding it harder than expected to run as fast as a decade-plus of chasing flies taught him he needed to run while trying to track the ball’s parabola by looking up and back over his left shoulder, hustling desperately to get to the ball, never really feeling confident he’d get there or make the grab but propelled towards it nonetheless, even when—and this, he thinks, surely is one of the reasons this play sticks with him—even when honestly and truly he loses track of the ball, running, a glance upward and back revealing nothing, yet there must be a sense it is somewhere within reach because he extends his oiled A2000 open unto the air, not seeing the ball, as he was taught and as he coaches, into the glove and really actually not even looking but running, moving fast with arm extended, glove open backhand, the ball accelerating downward then thwap in the deepest part of the glove, where the palm is sewn to the closed webbing, the part where it feels best.

He was pleased with himself upon having made the play, and a sensation akin to a soft and warm distant buzzing stayed with him for several days. It was like, he thought, the knowledge that a light fixture was switched on in a room in another part of a house. In order not to get carried away, he would remind himself of the context of the play: a single out during an unremarkable inning of a game in a coed rec slowpitch league. But he would circle back to it enough to add it to the list, as there really wasn’t any choice involved—great plays were great plays—and it was there for years, years of turning it over in his head, his feel for details as sharp and bright and deep as the river-blue sky into which he looked that day for the arcing ball as he ran, looking up and not finding it but still catching it, through some means other than seeing it into the glove. This is why he thinks about the play and, he realizes, what seems to connect several of the plays on the list, which has on it moments from other sports too. There is another he thinks of now, from this very softball league, another catch in fact, this one a diving catch on a short dying fly he ran to from left center, where, again as rover, he’d positioned himself as a fourth outfielder for this batter, running again hard as the ball descended, arriving at a point when there was nothing left but to leave his feet, to extend, to lay out, as in so many highlights he’d watched as a kid, a Rickey Henderson or a Chet Lemon play, his ochre A2000 reaching, feeling the ball in the webbing, hand then elbow hitting the burned-out late-summer Boston grass, more like straw, then the rest of him tumbling, rolling in the dry dirt dust. 

Doubtless a great catch, he remembers, but the thing with this one was the same as the thing with the last one: that same gap, that vacancy between his catching of the balls and, working backward, that last thing he remembers consciously doing or seeing before making each catch, there always seeming to be a space there, a void you must enter and trust that takes you out of our mind—and that phrase, “out of his mind,” stops him, as he thinks of its frequent usage in sports media and in casual conversations about sports to describe a superlative performance by a player, as in “he played out of his mind,” or even the first-person “I played out of my mind,” which he last heard from a colleague at school, a physics teacher who had broken 80 for the first time over the weekend, saying it exactly, “I played out of my mind,” as they assembled their salads on a Monday at lunch in the cafeteria, the teacher, one would guess, surely incorporating at some point that week an excursus in class or maybe a bonus question in the p-set on the theoretical center of gravity of a seven iron, known colloquially as the sweet spot, that point, science aside, where, especially if your irons are forged rather than cast, when you catch it you know it, man, because it’s like nothing else, because, and this may surprise you if you have not hit a lot of golf balls in your life, it feels like nothing, it feels like not-feeling, like your arms and hands and club have etherealized for a moment.

* * *

Coaching was not a decision, really, as this teaching position required, the job posting made clear, some form of after-school service in each of the three seasons, and he soon had realized that you didn’t need any real expertise or to be a former college athlete to coach a sport here, so in the fall he is an assistant coach with the JV boys golf team, driving the school van around New England to matches at seemingly ancient country clubs with fairways like billiard-table felt, careful not to talk setup or swing mechanics or anything like that on match days because the last thing you want is to be in your head on the course, knowing as he did that your best golf is played devoid of thought, light, free, and empty. 

In the winter he helps out with the debate team, assistant to the ageless librarian, Dr. Rien, intense, stern, demanding of her debaters, disdainful towards most of her colleagues, whom she viewed as undereducated but immediately social with him because he had a Ph.D. like she did, he therefore, in her view, someone of course interested in hearing about her dissertation on kenosis and literature in the empty time at tournaments when the students had dispersed to their assigned classrooms to compete and the advisors and coaches had nothing to do but mill around, or at night after one of the thrice-weekly debate practices when she’d retrieve the Armagnac she kept in her back office in the library, really a converted closet, it seemed, and he would procure two fresh Styrofoam cups from the teachers’ lounge off the cafeteria. He had nowhere to go, nothing to get back to, so they would drink and talk, staring out through the fern-frost on the old windows, Dr. Rien at times (always “Dr. Rien” to him, never Lucienne) intense, like a lot of the people he encountered in grad school, in her questions to him about why he still cared about sports, why he still played, why he elected to coach at the school in two of the three seasons rather than help her, like most of the other English teachers did, with forensics or the school literary magazine or the creative writing society. 

He didn’t have good answers for her when this stuff came up, certainly not thoughtful answers, anything that would convince Dr. Rien, with her Columbia PhD and decades of condescending to and battling with equally supercilious coaches over disciplinary matters, such as those that required a kid to miss practice or, heaven forbid, a league game. So he found himself resorting to semi-cliche, half-whispering things between cups of brandy that sounded to him maybe true, possibly true. Sometimes his theme would be that if you grew up with it, it formed you in ways that you couldn’t know at the time but could only maybe know later, that it was (here was the cliche) part of you, so in other words you needed it in some obscure way, if you wanted to know yourself, but, he granted, plenty of people had perfectly fine reasons for not wanting to know themselves, or for leaving certain parts of themselves behind. She would laugh lightly at this, seemingly amused, though his sense was that what he was suggesting, this extemporaneous partial account of himself he was giving, was simply incomprehensible to her, and maybe to anyone. So he did not, for example, tell her he played in a rec softball league in the city, and he did not, absolutely did not, tell her about the list of his greatest plays, the list that is always there, in his mind, part of him indeed, a living text of sorts.

* * *

It is late March and the first tryouts are again in the parking lot, there still being a hard layer of snow on the fields, and it could be Michigan all those years ago or it could be the Boston area now, this particular set of memories especially sharp, given not only the snaps of cold air and the whips of wind, all things here so intense and vivid, drop-cloth-thick American flags snapping atop poles, rigidified aluminum bats sending searing currents of hurt up from your palms, traveling through bone and somehow reaching your molars. Even catching simple flies is all pain, the old balls’ worn hide punching you in the glove hand, no, smacking you, thwap, stinging so hard you almost cannot believe it, as it lingers, becomes an ache, throbs. You start to think a little too much, thinking that it wouldn’t hurt so bad if you caught the ball in the webbing rather than the palm or pocket, and this slight adjustment, this slight re-focus, might work when playing catch to warm up but it will not work on a high fly accelerating downward, those last few yards like a sprinter’s kick at the end of a race, on you before you could think and, because you tried to think, tried to spare yourself a little pain, you miss.

He first hits grounders to the line of bundled-up ninth graders, then flies, the grounders brutal on the pocked asphalt, not slowing like a bouncer would on a grass or gravel infield but seeming, incredibly (this was an illusion, surely), to speed up as they approached you, obliterating any indecision, any thought beyond stay down, any thought at all really, no time to think here or certainly not when they’re tracking the fly balls he launches from the old taped-up fungo after backing the line up to the other end of the chipped-up parking lot beside the snow-crusted diamond, shale-hued pellets getting lost in the dun equinoctial sky, then falling fast upon them, a thing most of these kids could do in their sleep when they were nine or ten, catch a fly or a pop-up, so natural then, catching a baseball, so simple once, now suddenly a complex task with several factors to consider, with decisions and thought-processes, the ping off the fungo, it being harder to move in the cold, never ever feeling ready in this weather, anticipating the smack, the pain of the catch, from last time but also from all the times and years before, thinking maybe, just maybe I’ll make sure I catch this one in the webbing, ball then bouncing unnaturally off the asphalt.

The errors start happening, both drops and outright misplays, first one and then many, like the first enabled the rest, and soon catching flies has become for these kids harder than it’s ever been, and he can feel them tensing up a bit across the lot, knows they’re getting in their heads, and knows they’re hiding it beneath a nervous camaraderie out there, hoping for strength in numbers, so what if I dropped one because he did too, et cetera, besides we’re freezing our jocks off and no one should be playing baseball in this weather anyway, look at the snow on the diamond over there. He watches a kid run one down, looking from afar confident, as if he had it, can of corn, no problem, slowing up then reaching forward, glove extending lower than it should need to, the ball glancing off the tip of the webbing and down, bouncing and then rolling under the up-bent black cyclone fence that separated the converted-parking-lot practice field from the rest of the world, all of their lives out there beyond it, present and future. And he thinks of another drop, very similar, this one in a game, wet and cold, so he thinks April, off the tip of the A2000 as he was tracking it down, thinking the entire time he had it, never once thinking he didn’t, in fact, shocked when it hit the tip of his glove, feeling then the sting of shame in his cheeks, feeling so alone there in the outfield, and what’s worse, he now remembers, revisiting this now for the first time in a while, not knowing why, what’s worse is that he misplayed a second fly ball that same inning, the ball hit high and hard into right, and he’s caught flat-footed, of course now unsure of himself after the drop, and this now being the second play, this one soaring beyond him as he turns and runs back toward the right field fence. He throws himself for it, knowing it was futile, but still needing to dive, body awkward and extended on the cold mud, the ball rolling all the way to the fence, he then up on his feet and getting the ball, heaving a throw to the cut-off man, walking back to position, slowly, confused, he imagines, about why he can’t seem to do something he’d done with ease and maybe even joy in some of his earliest memories, indeed the sudden weight of a sullen new world now upon him, the weight of thoughts and self. Later there is talk about the two outfield errors in one inning, talk of them as a key reason for the loss that day, and they talk as if it doesn’t mean anything, just a thing that happens in a ball game when with freshman players, they’re going to make errors sometimes, going to get in their own heads, going to struggle, talking, it seems, as if he weren’t even there, there to hear and hurt. 

Matthew C. Borushko is a writer and scholar in Massachusetts. Selected work can be found here: matthewborushko.com.

Jeff Brain is a retired public school teacher. You can find more of his art on his website or on Instagram.

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