Magna cum mediocris

I was an above-average baseball player in my day. This is to say, I was no better—or worse, for that matter—than about half of the other five million kids playing at the time. Yet like many other baseball players who still pine for the glory days of youth, the passage of time has promoted the normal aggrandizement of the truth to these stories of better days long since passed.

Humble beginnings served to begat a soon humbled player. Most of my “career” was spent playing centerfield, a position requiring a fair amount of athleticism to cover a large amount of territory. This served only to mislead me into thinking that I was blessed with some modicum of aptitude. Future events would prove otherwise. While there is no room to argue against my having won the Green Team (Harding Township, NJ) MVP Award in 1980, one could easily make the argument about competing against a somewhat thin talent pool.

Perhaps the pinnacle of my young career came in a late-season game in 1982 in which I led off against a hapless visiting team with a home run—the legged out variety, since we had no fences—and subsequently collected a triple and single in successive at-bats. Rather than give me the chance to collect an elusive cycle, I received my one and only IBB in my fifth plate appearance that day. But in those ensuing years after Little League, I enjoyed fewer shining moments as my junior high teams played against better regional competition and as well I advanced to the Babe Ruth Baseball level.

Fantasy was crossly bitch-slapped by reality in the spring of 1983, when I was cut from the Madison High School (NJ) baseball team. I can still vividly recall to this day the moment I reviewed the “cut list” at the end of the week of tryouts, for it is seared in my mind as clearly as the time…ok, “times”…that Sharon Burd declined my advances for a post-date kiss. Checking the list, then checking it twice, read it again, the results were not nice. In a moment of uncomfortable masculine tenderness, I shared a man-hug with fellow cut victim Chris Stone, as we commiserated in our newly discovered athletic mediocrity. This was considered an acceptable reaction due to the fact that both of us were well-documented high school geeks and no one else was around to see the interaction.

Destiny would intervene, and in October 1983 our family relocated to East Kingston, NH. In the baseball season that followed, I would prosper as an integral piece in the history of baseball mediocrity in Exeter, New Hampshire.