Playing Baseball on Outsider Island
Playing Baseball on Outsider Island
By Kristy Bell
Seymour Addison Lee IV gripped one glove lace in his teeth and tugged at the other with his right hand to check its tightness, even though he’d already checked them a hundred times when he couldn’t sleep last night and another forty-two times on the ride into town. He pounded the well-worn leather with his fist, then removed the mitt to untie and retie his orange-stained tennis shoes. The digital numbers on the truck clock ticked to 9:45, and he prayed his dad was tracking the time. It was all he could do. His dad had told him to wait in the truck, and he didn’t want to mess up the whole outing by aggravating him right out of the gate.
“You keep this growth spurt up, you’re gonna catch up to your name, Addy,” Addison Lee III had said, playfully chucking Addy under the chin before ducking out of the pickup and heading inside. Addy’s mom made a pencil tic in the entryway to the room he shared with his brother each birthday. She’d marked the last one during his dad’s over the road haul two weeks ago and, for the first time, let him write his own information beside it: “57.5 – 11 yrs – 4/2/2007.” His dad had made a big deal over how it was almost three inches above the previous year’s mark when he came home. “Gonna be tall as his old man by the time I get home from Chicago in two weeks, I reckon.” He’d winked at Addy and pulled a new Braves cap out of his duffle bag.
Addy flushed with pleasure, remembering, and retrieved a wrinkled newspaper clipping from his shorts pocket. Scott County baseball tryouts for 11-12-year-olds were still at 10:00 a.m., still at Barker Field…and still three miles away. He sighed and willed the door of the Junior Foods Store open with his eyes. “Come on, Daddy,” he said aloud. If he held his hand to the brim of his new cap, he could see his dad leaning over the counter, smiling at the woman behind it, a six-pack of Old Milwaukee’s Best between them, their foreheads nearly touching.
A shot of jealousy twanged up his spine. His dad stayed on the road more than he was home, so it was rare Addy got him all to himself. Where kids at school could play catch with their dads in their yards, any time they wanted, he could only pester his mom’s brother, Uncle Alvin, so much. Uncle Alvin had pitched at Valdosta State, and he seemed to like teaching Addy, but he had two small children of his own. It was even worse when his mom took pity on him side-arming the ball against the porch base and taking grounders off the cement. She’d try to throw him some, and he didn’t have the heart to tell her she threw like a girl. He’d puffed out his chest that morning climbing into the pickup cab next to his dad, younger brother and sister scuffle-footing around the porch, staring longingly toward Addy in the truck until their mother corralled them back inside. Now here was this stranger, taking up his dad’s time and attention. Addy assigned her the worst name he could think of, the old hussy.
Just then, his father straightened, reached into his wallet and plucked out a bill. The woman dropped a couple of paper sacks in front of his dad, and Addy quickly shifted his gaze elsewhere as the man emerged, blinking in the bright April sun. He plopped the beer onto the bench seat between them, and Addy unclenched. They’d make it on time after all.
The hussy exited the store and lit a cigarette. Addy watched his father’s eyes fly to her and resisted the urge to tug his arm like his younger brother would. “What do you reckon they’ll have us do at the tryout, Daddy?”
The man glanced at him, then cradled one of the paper sacks around a beer can and cracked it open, wedging it between his legs. He shifted into reverse, draping his arm across the back of the seat. “Oh, they’ll probably have y’all take some fly balls, watch you throw and hit and run the bases.” The mitt made it awkward to rest one hand between his legs, one on the window armrest, but Addy tried to imitate the loose-limbed way his dad sat.
After a minute, he checked his laces again and ran through the motions of his fielding routine. His uncle’s old catcher’s mitt hamstrung him at first, wrong-handed as it was. But after obsessively practicing the motion of catching the ball with his left hand and seamlessly transferring it to his right hand before tucking the mitt under his right arm, then grabbing the ball with his now-bare left hand to throw it, he had the convoluted process down to a science that only delayed his throws by about half a second.
They wheeled into the parking lot, and the beauty of the Richland Community youth baseball field took his breath. Addy jumped out, mouth gaping, absorbing the scene through his pores, imagining himself in the big leagues. Skip Caray announced his name in the Braves starting line-up, right between Andruw and Chipper, the Lee cream in a Jones Oreo. He’d say it like that, too, because that was the way Skip Caray talked. Not that Addy had been to a game. He watched all the games he could on TV, though. Uncle Alvin lived next door and got them on TBS. Here at Barker Field, to Addy’s dismay, he was late to the show. Kids had already paired off and were zipping balls back and forth to warm up. The air rang with the smack of hard ball in soft leather and voices in various stages of changing. “Ow!” One kid took off his glove to shake it out. “You burned my hand with that throw!” They all seemed to know each other. Addy checked his mitt laces and licked his lips.
He drank in the details—the other boys’ new cleats left pocks in the infield and crisp chalk baselines practically leapt off red clay. Three puffy cumulus clouds cast moving shadows over the outfield, where green grass contrasted so sharply against blue sky it hurt his eyes. A man’s voice boomed over the field loudspeaker and directed the boys by last name to center field where they would take fly balls off a coach’s bat.
“Atta boy, Addy.” Addison III took up station in the bleachers, paper sack with a fresh beer at his feet. He clapped a little. “Show ‘em what you got.” Addy waved and jogged toward the outfield. For once, his dad was here to watch him, just him, and he felt confident, happy, invincible.
“Lookit that kid, Dad.” A stocky youngster with a crew cut pointed in Addy’s direction as he ran past them. Addy only had to wonder for a second why he’d attracted the other boy’s attention. “He don’t even have cleats!” Crew Cut’s dad shushed him, but not before the boy blurted the rest. “An’ he’s got a catcher’s mitt instead of a glove!”
Addy stopped, suddenly reeling with shame. At least his dad was too far away to have heard. For a minute, he thought about going over and knocking the kid’s block off, but nothing he said was untrue. Looking around, he was the weird one. The county where they lived was rural, a farming county, and he’d assumed everybody would be roughly in the same resource boat, even here in the county seat. But all the town kids sported fresh leather, batting gloves for both hands, jerseys from previous years. They caught the ball and grabbed it with their other hand to throw in one quick, fluid motion.
The stocky kid jogged past Addy to the gaggle of other boys, where he pointed at Addy walking toward them. A ripple of laughter passed through the group. In that moment, Addy hated them all, their smugness, their pressed white baseball pants. They looked like young colts prancing around before a race, a race he was already behind in.
“Just gimme a chance,” Addy muttered under his breath. He stood outside the group, ten steps to the left and roughly even with Crew Cut, who jostled to the front.
“What’s your name, country?” Crew Cut called to him.
Addy took a tentative step toward him. “Seymour Addison Lee the fourth. Folks call me Addy.”
“Attie! That’s a girl’s name!”
Tink! They didn’t have time to talk anymore. The coach smacked the first fly out toward center field, short and sinking, and waved off as if to say, let it go. Addy sprinted toward it. Crew Cut, realizing Addy was going after the ball, turned on his own jets, but he was too late. Addy dove in front of him and stole the catch. His muscles felt fluid, like a liquid extension of his brain, flowing wherever it directed them.
“WELL! Looks like we got us a country boy that can actually catch somethin’ besides piglets!” Crew Cut huffed. Addy picked himself up and glanced at him hopefully. Maybe he’d been impressed. Maybe he wanted to be friends. He took off his mitt, stuck it under his arm, and zipped the ball back to the coach who was catching.
“Don’t matter.” Crew Cut raised his voice to make sure Addy heard him. “I bet his mama makes his clothes.” He trotted back to the pack and elbowed another kid, a tall, rangy blonde.
The tall kid said, again loud enough for Addy to hear it, “Yeah, I bet his daddy drinks all their money.” He gestured toward the bleachers. “He’s in the stands drinkin’ right now!”
That burned Addy up. He clenched his fist and thought about taking the mitt off and mixing it up with old blondie. “He is not. You ever hear of hydratin’?”
“Hydratin’! Is that what they’re calling it now? Nobody else’s daddy is hydratin’ at 10 o’clock in the morning.”
Addy instinctively knew these kids didn’t have to stay behind with the substitute while everybody else rode the bus over to Providence Canyon on the 5th grade field trip. Or maybe the city school didn’t even go to Providence Canyon. Maybe they went to Atlanta, to a Braves game. The day of the field trip, he and Jamie Barker, the only two kids whose folks couldn’t come up with the $30 field trip fee, had taken turns reading out loud to Mrs. Russian, the substitute. He’d moped around outside the house that evening, anxious and moody, until his mama asked him what was wrong.
“You reckon we’ll ever have money again, Mama?”
She sucked her breath in sharply and clenched her jaw. “Baby, you know the mill shut down and your daddy had to take work where he could get it.” Then she hugged him and whispered fiercely, “You’re rich in all the ways that matter, Addy. Don’t you forget it.”
But on Outsider Island here in center field, his homemade shorts chafed his legs, and his uncle’s mitt bounced around on his wrist, wrong-handed and too big. Crew Cut started a sing-song chant, and several other boys joined in, quiet enough so the coaches wouldn’t hear it in the infield, “Aaadddy, Aaadddy, alkie for a Daaadddy,” and he didn’t feel rich at all.
The coach lifted fly ball after fly ball to the group in center field. Addy caught every ball hit toward him except one that was way over his head, and a kid he recognized from the grade ahead of him in their county school even told him, “Good catch,” after one running stab. But the other boys had formed a wedge that didn’t include him. He languished, slump-shouldered, between his turns, a little apart from the group, no longer sure he even wanted to play baseball. Finally, the coach waved the boys in for a water break. Addy ran to his dad and stood beside the bleachers where he sat.
“How’s it goin’, boy? I saw you make a couple of nice catches. You gettin’ along with the other kids okay?”
He kicked a clod of clay. “Not really. They’re bein’ jerks.”
“Jerks! You lettin’ what some snot-nosed city kids say get under your skin? What are they saying?”
Addy shook his head but didn’t trust himself to speak.
His dad stopped, the paper sack halfway to his lips. “Addy, look at me. What are they saying?”
He met his father’s eyes. “They’re sayin’ bad stuff about you.”
“Like what?” He set the sack-wrapped can on the bleacher in front of him.
Addy’s voice dropped to a whisper. Shame reddened his ears. “That you’re…an
alkie.”
His dad chuckled, a short, bitter laugh. “Oh, that’s it? They think I’m an alcoholic? What do you think?”
“Well, nobody else’s daddy is drinkin’ beer out here.”
His dad sighed. “Son, we’ve had a rough couple of years since the mill shut down, and I reckon you’re old enough to know that. We’re poor, and I reckon you know that too. These kids don’t know half of what you know. That ain’t exactly fair, is it?” Addy shook his head and looked at him sideways.
Addison III lit a cigarette and took a long, thoughtful pull. “It may be that I drink too much. But Addy, there’s a lot worse things a man can do. Least he ain’t hurtin’ anybody but himself.” He spit on the ground and his volume ticked up a notch. “When any of their daddies makes a living on the road for weeks at a time and comes home just long enough to get his kids straight in his mind before he has to leave again, then they can say things to you.”
It seemed to Addy that his dad was talking about things a lot bigger than he understood, things outside his control. He focused on the ground under the bleachers where ants swarmed over a beetle body. “Daddy, I’m just a kid.”
His dad grabbed his arm, firm but not hard, pulled him close so his beery breath puffed into Addy’s nostrils in waves. “Son, you’re gonna be a man, a Lee man, and a Lee man has two choices. He can either let somebody else tell him who he is and believe it and be whipped before he starts, or he can make ‘em eat those words. He let go of Addy’s arm. “Now which one are you gonna be?”
Addy pictured his younger brother and sister, safe at home, probably watching cartoons in the house. “Can’t we just go?” He knew he was whining, but he didn’t care. If he sounded pitiful enough, maybe his dad would take him away from the taunts.
“I’ll tell you what. It looks like your break’s about over.” His dad’s nostrils flared in and out and his chest heaved. He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go run an errand. I want you to go back out on the field and try your best while I’m gone. When I get back, if you still want to go, we can.”
Panic blossomed in Addy. “You’re gonna leave me here?” Surely his dad wasn’t already out of beer. Maybe he was going back to see the hussy. His voice rose in pitch until it cracked. He sounded like his little sister. “By myself?”
“Yes, son, I am.” He was about to throw Addy to the wolves, and he was completely calm about it. He walked to the trash can by the fence and tossed the beer sack. “I want you to go out there and hold your head up and show these boys what you can do. And I want you to think about what I said. Can you do that?”
Addy shrugged. “I guess so,” he said without conviction.
“Come on, now.” He squeezed Addy’s shoulder. “You’re named after three generations of Seymour Addison Lees. Don’t you let yourself be the first one of ‘em that’s a quitter.”
That wasn’t fair, and his dad knew it. It was a big name to carry, and the last thing Addy wanted to do was be an embarrassment to it. His head snapped up to meet his father’s eyes and he nodded with a confidence he didn’t fully feel, “Yes sir. I’ll do my best.”
He walked back onto the field and took his spot in the line of boys waiting to bat, trying not to think about how the only friendly face he knew was leaving, trying not to watch the taillights disappear, trying not to let three generations of Seymour Addison Lees down by crying.
The coach who was hitting before the break was catching when Addy stepped into the left-handed batter’s box. He stood and took off the catcher’s mitt and mask, sticking out his hand. “I’m Coach Andy.” He towered over Addy, with a shock of sandy blonde hair and a quick smile that reminded him of a sunflower. “And that’s Coach Larry on the pitcher’s mound,” he said, pointing. “You made some nice plays in the outfield.”
Addy took Coach Andy’s hand. “Thank you, sir.”
“What’s your name?”
“Seymour Addison Lee the fourth. Folks call me Addy.”
“Good to meet you, Addy. Don’t let the other boys get you down. They can be a little hard on new guys. Most of them played together last year.” He scuffed the clay off the plate with his foot and crouched again. “Truth be told, they’re probably a little jealous of you.
Jealous? These kids that have it all? “Really?” Addy stepped out and took a couple of practice swings, pondering this possibility.
“Yes, really.” The man winked at him, the hint of another grin tugging the corners of his mouth. “They don’t know how to handle somebody new that’s better than them, but they’ll learn.” He dropped the catcher’s mask over his face and pounded his glove.
Addy stepped into the box again feeling ten feet tall. Coach Andy had judged that he had potential. The coach held up his glove to Coach Larry on the pitcher’s mound, signaling him to wait another second. “One more thing. Addy, which hand do you write with?”
Addy rested the bat on his shoulder and held up his left hand.
“Okay, I thought so. Let’s see what you got.”
Coach Larry wound up and pitched, a big, fat meatball off the outside corner, way slower than Uncle Alvin threw. When Addy’s uncle taught him to bat, he’d challenged Addy to hit anything he pitched over a piece of plywood he threw down in the pasture as a plate. Addy quickly learned that the more he connected, the less time he had to spend rounding up balls. After a few months of practice, Uncle Alvin started mixing in curves and sliders. After Uncle Alvin, this was almost too easy. Addy timed his swing and stroked the pitch the other way, down the left field line.
The next pitch was right over the middle, and Addy gave it a ride over the center field fence. He saw with satisfaction that Crew Cut, who had rotated from the batting line to center field, had to climb the fence to retrieve it. Even from here, Addy could see the surprise on his face. By now, most of the kids in the hitting line were watching, staring at him, and not in a mean way.
Coach Andy high-fived him when his turn at bat was over. He wished his dad could see him now. He kept craning his neck looking for the truck turning back in, even as a couple of kids congratulated him and asked him for hitting pointers.
A half-hour later, his dad got out of the truck carrying a large plastic Walmart bag. Addy had moved back to the outfield to shag flies, and Crew Cut started in on him again, “Aaadddy, Aaadddy, alkie for a Daaadddy,” but nobody joined him. This time, the other country kid, whose name was Brian, told him to knock it off.
The voice on the loudspeaker directed them to run two laps around the field and check for their names on the list posted on the third base dugout wall when they finished. A few minutes later, Addy found himself among a scrum of boys gathered around fluttering pieces of paper taped to the cinderblock. He scanned anxiously down two lists and part of the third, before he found his name, the newest member of the Rockets along with Crew Cut, whose name, he found out, was Jarrod. He guessed Jarrod would have to learn how to deal with being the second-best player on his team. A couple of boys slapped him on the back and Coach Andy shook his hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his dad watching him. Their eyes met, and his dad gave him a small nod.
The coaches said a few words about first practices, then handed out jerseys and game schedules. Addy’s dad left his seat and moved to the dugout area where he clapped to get Addy’s attention, “Come on over here now, Addy.” Addy’s stomach jumped into his throat, as he slung his new jersey over his shoulder. Surely his dad wouldn’t drain a beer right there in front of all those kids and coaches.
To his relief, Addison III’s hands were empty. The Walmart bag sat, shapeless and loaded with danger, on the bleachers where his dad had sat before moving to the dugout area. His dad said, “Go get me that bag, son.”
Addy walked as slowly as he could, steeling himself against the inevitable. He hoped some of the crowd would clear before he got back to his dad, who plopped down beside the dugout in the thick of the activity.
When he set the bag on the bleachers at his dad’s feet, the man rounded up the handles and held them out to Addy. “It’s for you…kind of a celebration.”
Addy shook his head vigorously, blushing. “Oh, no sir, I’m too young for that.” His mama had made him promise he wouldn’t start drinking until he was at least twenty-one. He wasn’t sure he wanted to, even then.
The man laughed, “No you’re not. I reckon you’re a year or two too old, if anything.”
With trembling hands, Addy reached into the bag and pulled out the contents: a pair of brand-new cleats just his size, and a pristine Rawlings fielding glove, left-handed, with Chipper Jones’ autograph in the glove well.
On the ride home, Addy’s thoughts swilled around in his head, a jumble of confusion. On one hand, his dad had left him to fend for himself. On the other, if he hadn’t, would Addy have ever gotten past his fear? Maybe one of the things a man could do that was worse than drinking too much was taking the easy way out.
His dad cracked open a fresh beer. “I’m proud of you, son. I knew you’d make the team.”
“How could you, Daddy? I didn’t even know! I wanted to go home!”
His dad smiled a tight little smile. “I just knew you could, that’s all.” He skipped a beat. “I’ve seen you practicing with your uncle.”
Suddenly, Addy remembered that he sometimes thought he saw the curtains in his parents’ room move when he was out shagging flies from Uncle Alvin, times when his dad was sleeping off a long haul. “Daddy, I thought…” It occurred to him how badly he’d misjudged. The whole time, when he thought his dad didn’t care about his problems, that he was leaving him in his hour of need to get more beer, or see the hussy—the whole time, his dad had known him better than he knew himself.
The realization of it weighted his heart and he felt ancient. I think I’m about to embarrass our name, Daddy, he thought. He leaned against the window and cried. His dad drank his beer and drove in silence, letting him have his space.
That night, Addy fell asleep with the smell of new leather in his nostrils, and richness on his mind.
Kristy Bell is a writer, Navy veteran, and baseball fan who lives in southwest Georgia. Although she knows every year can’t be the Braves’ year, she hopes for it anyway. She has recent work in Bull Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and Rivanna Review. She wrote this story specifically for The Twin Bill, and enjoyed seeing how many names she could work in from the 2007 Braves roster. Find her on X at red_dirt_poet.
Matt Lawrence is a Spanish/ESOL teacher in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the father of two young men and has been deriving joy from making art for decades. You can check out some of his work on Instagram @Mattymarcador.
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