RP - Ricky Vaughn - Team#2_The Movies

Willie Mays Hayes: What the hell league you been playing in?
Rick Vaughn: California Penal.

I was a freshman in high school when Dale Allen was a senior. He was a pitcher, the older brother of my good friend Mike, and he was large, tanned, with a dopey handsome smile. I was a catcher at the bottom of the totem pole, which meant that I caught long, long bullpen sessions in the off-season where pitchers like Dale "honed their stuff" and "worked on a new pitch," which was most often some weird slider that hopped to the plate and caromed like a bb off of me and then the backstop.

Dale threw hard, in general contrast to his sort of cocky slow meandering but also charismatic persona which would later make him a like #1A and almost admirably committed frat boy. He was not however able to control the flight path of even his fastball, the old standby 3-0 strike getter. The strikes that he did throw were like lightning strikes in that they were frightening and beautiful and rare and could not be expected to happen again soon or ever.

And so not only was I this young kid on (not "on" yet but at least "in proximity to") a team of men--for men they seemed and still seem even as I am ten years older than these "men" were at the time--with goatees and neck hair and developed musculatures and babe girlfriends, etc., but I had to quite literally wrangle in the most frightening aspects of one of this one guy's advanced level of at least let's say physical maturity, his fastball. I was not quite literally required to "catch" and "block" and "control" the very sort of a hyper-masculine "high hard one" if you will, rather than fading into the pattern of the wallpaper which was more my preference at the time.

In any event, it's all very Freudian and fraught with latency and fear, etc. etc. and I'm not sure it's very interesting, but suffice it to say that young men encounter these situations with great frequency, ie. in which older men act a certain way and younger man/boy must interpret and negotiate and extrapolate and later, in his blog, try and piece it all back together and hope that he is not nailed in the junk with a metaphorical or proverbial fastball.

I once took a curveball in the dirt on one hop right into the stones and it hurt very badly, even though it was only a slow curve from a coach and not like a Dale fastball or anything. That would've been that much worse.

major league, summon the righty

Lineup - The Movies

C - John Kinsella
1B - Jack Elliot
2B - Ken Burns
3B - Roger Dorn
SS - Nicky Rogan
LF - Terence Mann
CF - Kelly Leak
RF - Shoeless Joe Jackson

SP - Bugs "Baseball Bugs" Bunny
RP - Ricky Vaughn

Manager -