The Last Mitt
The Last Mitt
Michael Isaac Shokrian
We live in a right-handed world. And back in the ‘70s when I was growing up in Los Angeles, most baseball mitts were made for righties. I am a lefty.
Within the first year of my family’s landing in L.A. from Tehran, I noticed the mitts. Kids used them for Little League at Rancho Park, Flies Up on the playground at Castle Heights Elementary, and Pickle on their streets every afternoon before dinner. And while they may have thrown baseballs, softballs, dog-spit-drenched tennis balls, or rocks; while they may have swung bats, broomsticks, or broken tree branches; they only caught with mitts. This was my first impression of America: a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, a mitt on every hand.
On our block, Brian down the street had one; his little brother Mikey had one; Jeff across the street had two; both his sisters had one. On our playground, mitts were as ubiquitous as sneakers, lunchboxes, and sweet-smelling erasers. And just like those American items, not everyone had one. For those of us who did not, a mitt was one more thing to have FOMO over, forcing us to either muster the courage to ask and borrow, or go barehanded. And there was little chance of theft—everyone wrote their names on the back of their mitts using a Marks-a-Lot.
In Tehran we didn’t have baseball, so no need for mitts. And because soccer is played with feet, I was comfortably ignorant of the world’s righty bias. It was in America where I discovered I threw left-handed, and that it wasn’t normal. Not only did I have to contend with being a brown-skinned, non-English-speaking foreigner, I had the added burden of being a lefty. Normals had fair skin, spoke English and threw righty. My little brother was not only lighter skinned than me, he was a righty. Making friends came easy for him and he could borrow a righty mitt anytime to play Pickle or Over-The-Line. So he got to play more, kids knew him better, were more likely to pick him. So he got better. Doors open for you when you’re a righty.
I was already a shy kid and there weren’t many lefties at school so I had little chance of borrowing even if I had the nerve. I did play-by-play, imitating Vin Scully; learned to throw righty, very badly; and shoved my lefthanded fingers into a righty mitt when I got the chance.
They had mitts at the Guild Drug on National Boulevard, along with candy bars, gum, hairspray, and cigarettes. But mitts at the Guild didn’t look regular, being small and made of vinyl. We didn’t know where real mitts came from. Whenever our mom went to the supermarket next to the Guild, we’d ask her to buy us a mitt.
“Who wears such big ugly gloves?”
“It’s a mitt,” we’d explain,“for baseball.”
“Leave us alone with your meet,” she’d say. “Baseball is for Amrikayi.”
Exactly!
One afternoon she came home and pulled something out of a paper bag.
“Here,” she said, tossing a tiny vinyl mitt our way. We jumped to thank her, then pulled and tugged to be first to use it, a struggle that lasted only as long as it took to see it was a righty. My little brother stopped tugging and waited for me to relinquish it. I watched him slide his fingers in with the ease of one who belongs, punching the pocket like an Amrikayi baseballer.
Still, Brian and Jeff laughed when we showed up on the street.
“What is that? That’s for babies!”
But we made it work, with me pushing the fingers on my right hand into finger holes meant for the opposite hand. We took turns, but I was finally in the game.
That was the first mitt.
***
It wasn’t until seventh grade that I got a genuine leather lefty mitt. A classmate gave it to me. Mark came from a baseball family and had lots of mitts. Other than being a fellow lefty, he was a normal American with shaggy red hair, a tiny nose, and freckles. He was also an experienced ballplayer with a loose gait and easy feel for the diamond. He and his little brother lived up the street and we played a lot of ball. Mark let me borrow one of his mitts; an outfielder’s mitt, large and heavy. He let me take it home and bring it back to play the next day. At the end of seventh grade, he let me keep it. Throughout the school year, Mark was my friend, but also a bit of a bully who regularly tormented his little brother and often called me Beaner, Taco or any form of brown-skin/Mexican-style pejorative because of my brown skin. In that regard, Mark was also normal. I never said anything because besides the fact that he was bigger than me, I didn’t have many friends and most of the time Mark was honest, playful, and generous. He let me have his old mitt knowing I had never had one of my own. He was also starting a sandlot league and needed players, so he needed me to have a mitt.
We played in Mark’s sandlot league for two years on a deserted lot up the block. During that time, I learned to hit, pitch and use my mitt. I even made Specs. A Spec—short for “Spectacular Play”—was a stat Mark invented so that on the rare occasion when he got out (his lifetime batting average was over .900; he led the league in average, homers, RBI, and hits) it would be counted as a Spec—like a Walk or Sacrifice—for batting average purposes. Like America itself, it was Mark’s league and Mark’s rules. I didn’t feel I had the right to question it, just learn it and play within it. I even started believing in the new stat and felt special whenever I made a catch that Mark counted a Spec. Just having the mitt made me feel less incomplete in my daily life.
That was the second mitt.
***
In high school, as the Iranian revolution played itself out with a massive influx of Iranian youth registering at our school, I was confronted once again with being an outsider. This time in two cultures—Americans saw me as too ethnic, dark or foreign, even with my mitt; and Iranians saw me as too Amrikayi, in part, because of my mitt. I wasn’t Persian enough for the newly arrived Persians and was never American enough for the Americans I had grown up with. When I didn’t make the high school baseball team, with the sandlot league having dissolved on account of puberty, my mitt got tucked in the back of my closet.
When I started college, I got busy with my burgeoning adulthood, exploring higher education and aspirations. I studied literature and tried to be a writer. I hung out with brooding poets and provocative philosophy majors, learning to roll French tobacco and drink espresso and tequila without gagging. Mitts didn’t have a role in that.
After graduation, I moved with my girlfriend, a fellow poet, to San Francisco. We got jobs at a warehouse in Berkeley that distributed small press books.
Not knowing anyone in my new town triggered familiar feelings of being the brown-skinned foreigner on the outside looking in. I had been living in the U.S. for fifteen years by then, spoke perfect English, had a degree in English Lit, even had an American girlfriend, but outsider fears are strong.
But the warehouse had a softball team and I spoke baseball. That was my in. We went to the Sears on Geary and Masonic where, at twenty-three, I bought a new mitt for the first time.
It was a Rawlings, and even though it was a lefty mitt, it bore the signature of right-handed Braves outfielder Dale Murphy in its brown leather pocket – lefties were still under-represented in the mitt-pocket-signature industry. I had heard many stories about how to break in a new mitt and when we got back to our apartment, we doused ours in Mazola, rolled them backwards and left them overnight under the rear wheel of my car. By Opening Day of the Berkeley Warehouse League at Kinney Field, my mitt was soft, pliable and ready. My all-American girlfriend who had always seen me as an exotic Persian poet, assumed I knew nothing about catching a fast-moving hardball thrown from a hundred feet away. On the field for our first practice, she watched me warm up, peppering the ball in and out of my mitt with ballet-like finesse. She was as impressed by my baseball skills as she had been by my writing.
In the bottom of the final inning of the league championship game, I walked to the plate—the new guy on the team, the foreigner—and promptly slapped an opposite-field game-winning liner to left that gave us the C-League championship. It made the Berkeley paper. My mitt had gotten me in the door, helped me gain the respect of my peers, and connected me to co-worker Mac, the Red Sox fan who would become my best and oldest friend.
After our girlfriends wised up, Mac and I spent many afternoons and evenings on the front lawn of Oakland Tech High School—dubbed “Ricky High” after alum Ricky Henderson—playing long catch to soothe our broken hearts. We threw the ball as hard, high and far as we could, outfielders mowing down runners out at the plate, making miraculous running catches and sweeping tags, over and over until we were two silhouettes among the pine trees and buildings in the hazy purple dusk of the evening commute on Broadway.
I ended up in St. Louis for a stint, and once again my mitt was my calling card into the adult league at Forest Park. Always the outsider at first, it only took a few minutes on the diamond playing pepper and long-toss to show the Show-Me staters I was one of them.
In New Orleans a few years later for law school after failing to accomplish much as a poet, it was my mitt again that got me a spot on the Tulane intramural softball league at City Park where I bonded with classmates from all parts of the country.
Wherever I landed in America, my mitt got me through doors and helped me fit in, snug and confident. Running down fly balls in the gap, snagging ropes hit on a line or spearing comebackers, my mitt handled hits as good as any real American. I finally felt like I belonged.
That was the third mitt.
***
I found my way back to Los Angeles after years of wandering. I got a job and eventually married the girl next door – if you consider the corner of Pahlavi Boulevard & Wilshire to be next door. Like me, my wife had landed in America at age seven and grown up in Los Angeles. For me, she had just enough American in her that I could handle her traditional Persian ways. For her, I was just Persian enough to satisfy her worried parents. A perfect match! Our first summer together, we bought new mitts – it was her first. We played catch and I taught her the finer points of fielding and oiling. We rolled our mitts under the tires of our car overnight and joined an adult league at La Cienega Park. She played a cautious second base, never willing to damage her manicure just to get her glove down in the dirt to stop a silly grounder. We won no games that season or the next. The third season, we won our first game as our one-year-old son ran onto the field to celebrate.
I had my first catch with my son not long after he could walk. I got him a vinyl baby mitt from Big 5 similar to the one my mom bought us from the Guild. I taught him to stand at the plate, to swing level, to be Baseball Ready in the field. He was pretty good at catch by the time our second son was born. The four of us would take our mitts to Rancho Park to play, me pitching, them taking turns catching and batting. They each had their own mitt – no need to share. Even Mom got into it, cheering her boys on from the outfield and whacking long fly balls.
When we signed them up at Sherman Oaks Little League, I was excited. As a grownup I got to be part of the community I didn’t have access to as a kid. My parents, fresh-off-the-boat immigrants, were too busy surviving to figure out assimilation and getting us situated culturally. We were on our own, figuring out America step by stumbling, humbling step. Watching my boys warm up on the diamond alongside neighbors and classmates, I could see they had no sense of their own belonging – those who belong from the outset never do. But I did get that sense of belonging. I was just another Little League Dad, warming my boys up before games, coaching their teams, and cheering them on.
By the time our third son was born, I was burned out on coaching and shuttling between games and leagues. But there were moments when I’d open that internal eye and see the bliss: playing catch before a game at Van Nuys Sherman Oaks park with my kids; pepper, pickle, high flies. They had their own mitts and I had mine. We’d throw and catch without words, just a sublime harmony that was awesome.
Now my mitt is in my trunk, and I am always prepared for a game of catch. It’s a point of pride after growing up not having my own, having to stick a wrong hand into a borrowed one, having a friend casually toss me one that he no longer needed, maybe not even realizing what a huge deal it was. But time catches up with everyone; my back is sore often these days; trying to be a responsible husband and father takes its toll on the body. When my youngest asks me to throw him fly balls and grounders in the yard, I don’t jump like I used to. He has to beg. But I know what lies ahead, a time when they get older and independent—and won’t ask. So I creak up off the couch, grab my mitt, and play, storing the sensations in a memory bank I will draw from in my golden years, a retirement account of visceral memories—playing catch with my kids, them needing me, being one with them—an account I can pass on to them when it’s time.
These days my boys play on their own, no longer needing me to pitch, catch, or remind them to crouch and be Baseball Ready. They have everything they need. The five of us drive to Ocean View Park in Santa Monica, the place they call “Grass Hill.” While they play, my wife and I go for a long walk on the beach, no longer needing to monitor them. When we get back, we watch them play on their makeshift diamond on Grass Hill—a shirt is first base; an old beanie is second; a rock is third. But home plate – where all the action happens, where balls and strikes are argued, where swings and hits spark motion, where runners score—that’s where my mitt sits. My name is written on the back in Marks-a-Lot. The last mitt.
Michael Isaac Shokrian is an Iranian-American writer born in Hamburg, Germany and raised in Los Angeles by way of Tehran. Michael learned English mainly from watching terrestrial TV and listening to the great Vin Scully broadcast Dodger baseball every night on AM radio. Michael is a practicing attorney in Los Angeles and publisher/editor-in-chief of the Thieving Magpie a digital literary quarterly. His debut novel, American Playground, will be released in May 2025. He lives in Studio City, CA.
Jason David Córdova lives in Puerto Rico as an illustrator and painter. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72. You can visit his shop on Red Bubble.
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