3B - Roger Dorn - Team#2_The Movies

Jake Taylor: What I was concerned with was why you didn't come up with that grounder that Rockert hit in the 9th?
Roger Dorn: It was out of my reach. What do you want me to do, dive for it?

I played one game at third base in the last ten years of my career, during a summer ball game in high school. It was a night game; from my new strange location I was seeing double, completely disoriented by the perspective shift, like looking at your own house on Google Earth.

I was a catcher exclusively by then, just specialized enough to stay on each year and do the grunt work and keep quiet. Summer ball was an improvisational exercise, with kids out of town or without a ride or just gone, and I probably asked to play third base from boredom, or I might have leaped eagerly at the suggestion.

I borrowed a mitt and stood anxiously on the infield dirt, hoping that I might discover a hidden talent for ground balls, the way that I used to hope that a basketball scout would drive past the hoop at the park by chance and notice how effortlessly I could lay the ball up with both my right and my left hand (I hoped in turn that they wouldn't pull up whilst I practiced my leaping sky-hook, or my free throws).

Catchers aren't supposed to play anywhere else but maybe first base in an emergency, or at the end of a pro career. Catchers are used to balls delivered by hand directly, from allies; there is always the undercoat of collaboration; the ball is a friend, and a ball in the dirt is a friend whose fallen in with some sour crowd and should be pulled up out of that business.

A ground ball though is not a friend. It comes off the bat--which is more than anything just weird--and it is as angry and unpredictable as a mean drunk. And a ground ball is charged with malice--hitters want to beat fielders, and would just as soon see their hit careen off of a wrist or, Jesus forbid, a face. A pitch and a ground ball are completely different, and in the field you don't get to wear a mask unless you've already had your nose reupholstered.

In my short time at third, a batter finally chopped a slow ground ball towards me. I charged, but in the air the ball seemed to bend its path like a ping-pong ball played with English behind it. My footwork was so unruly that in the face of this perceived ripple in the space-time fabric I'd turned 90 degrees and--by then facing the pitcher's mound--I watched the ball mozy by over my shoulder as peacefully as a passing cloud.

It went foul. I grinned; it was summer ball, and there was a small chance that my ballet looked deliberate and intuitive. I had no further action that day, and I never played third base again.

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