The Orlando Cepeda

The Orlando Cepeda

By Jeff Burt

When I open my glove from high school, four decades past, it opens like a blossom in the sun, warms like an old friend—known, intimate. After a few practices, the smell of the infield dirt and the outfield grass start to smother the fingers of the glove. By the end of the year the dusty lines and the lime of the base paths covered the glove.

But a bat has an otherness to it—a mystery, a sense of the unchanging aura to the ash—the grain a representation of one life lived. The sound of the bat flush on a ball its enduring second life.

My first bat I owned was a used Minnie Minoso, a thirty-ounce ash so white it looked bleached with only a few stripes, with a large head, handle chipped and useless without a plug of black electrical tape at the bottom. We lived in the county and had no organized leagues, so we played sandlot, which was more four dirt spots created out of pasture and a mound with a few linear lanes where our tennis shoes dragged. A bat held together by black tape seemed to fit.

When I was twelve, I bought a new Nellie Fox, a two-tone fired bat with a thick handle that made for a level swing and kept the bat by my bed the night before my first Little League game. It was a singles bat, an up-the-middle hitter’s bat, a bat that fit wearing a t-shirt with a drug store’s name and two-colored cap.

In high school I graduated to an Al Kaline with a thin handle and heavy head, thirty-three ounces of hard wood to hammer a ball, the bat with which I learned to roll my wrists. It was a game bat, a bat with hits in it, a smooth-fired ash with dark grains that zigzagged from knob to head like lightning. It gave me a curious confidence, as if it was something in the wood that desired concussing the ball, as if the wood itself was having fun, the waving through the air at a pitch reminding the wood of its days growing in the wind, perhaps the ball a bird that gripped its branches and needed some paying back. It lost its life, sheered at the plate by a pitch just above my hands.

But it was the Orlando Cepeda I treasured.

One day at a ball field a man gave me the thirty-five-inch, thirty-five-ounce monster, a wild catfish of wood, too heavy for a game bat so I only used it for practice to limber up, to make the lighter bats quicker through the strike zone. The Orlando Cepeda. The Baby Bull of the San Francisco Giants.

In a regional playoff my senior year I faced a knuckleballer, and against the advice of my coach—but with the encouragement of my teammates—I brought the Cepeda to the plate. Meant for practice, it seemed like practice to hit a knuckleball.

I do not remember the feeling of the first hit, my first home run that soared over the left field fence and landed in a cemetery. I woke in a blur when I rounded third. Nor do I remember exactly where the second ball I hit went over the center field fence the following inning or why the Orlando Cepeda stuck to my hands the entire revolution around the bases, for which I would garner rounds of laughter.

I used the bat one more time, hit a triple, and never used the bat again.

Sometimes announcers call bats lumber, blue-collar tools of uniformity. But each baseball bat has a life, an identity, born from the tree from which it came, alive in the hands like lightning in the sky. For me, the Orlando Cepeda provided the thunder.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, and works in mental health. He has contributed to Gold Man Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, Per Contra, and Clerestory.