Welcome
Thanks for visiting the new Between the Lines blog.
I'm excited to say that I've received some encouraging feedback regarding the possibility of Between the Lines: A Father, A Son, and America's Pastime being published.
Below is the preface and some sample stories from the manuscript. I hope you enjoy them. Please consider posting a comment.
(All stories are copyrighted by Joe Shrode)
I'm excited to say that I've received some encouraging feedback regarding the possibility of Between the Lines: A Father, A Son, and America's Pastime being published.
Below is the preface and some sample stories from the manuscript. I hope you enjoy them. Please consider posting a comment.
(All stories are copyrighted by Joe Shrode)
When I was 14 years old, I moved on to Pony League. I made the All
Stars my first year — the only 13-year-old to make the team that year. As a
14-year-old, our All Stars team advanced four levels deep in the national Pony
League tournament. I hit three home runs during that tournament run, batted nearly
.750 and even pitched a few games. It was great to come home and read my name
in the newspaper. Mom made sure I had plenty of copies of the sports section,
even though she was on the road with us. She never missed a game.
Mom and Dad were divorced by then. Occasionally, I wondered
if, wherever he was, Dad had read my name in the paper, too. Is he proud of me?
Is he happy about how well I’ve done?
On a humid August afternoon in 1977, my football coach tells
me Mom is coming to pick me up early from football practice. I am a sophomore
in high school and just beginning my first season on the varsity team.
“It’s your dad. It doesn’t look good,” she tells me on the
way to the hospital.
Just the day before, he seemed better. He was lying awake in
the hospital bed. He’d been unconscious for two weeks, but for some reason, he
woke up during my visit with him in the ICU. I told him I am now on the varsity
football team. He smiled.
“I’ll never miss one of your games,” he assured me.
“Okay, Dad.”
I told him I believed him, even though he had rarely come to
any of my games. Sometimes he said he would, but I knew better; he never did.
In that awkward, final moment with my dad, I didn’t know what else to say. But
he promised, and I said okay. We made a deal. It meant he couldn’t die; it
meant I didn’t want him to die.
“Code blue, second floor ICU.”
I flinch as I hear the shrill voice over the hospital intercom
a few hours into my stay. I know it is for Dad. I look at Mom who is sitting
next to me. She looks back at me. Neither of us moves. Mom, our neighbor
Bernie, who is Mom’s best friend, and I just sit there in the downstairs lobby.
We stay down there because Dad’s new wife is upstairs. It just feels too
weird.
Dad would not make it to any of my football games. Once
again, he broke his promise. He and I never did “have a catch” as Ray
Kinsella phrased it in Field of Dreams.
***
I only saw him years later, when he was worn down by life.
(Ray Kinsella, Field of Dreams)
(Ray Kinsella, Field of Dreams)
When I first watched the movie Field of Dreams, I was
struck by how the relationship between the main character, Ray Kinsella, and
his father so closely mirrors my experience with my dad.
My dad played minor league baseball many years before I
was born, with a dream of going to the majors. He was a catcher — a good one, I’m told. Good enough that he could have made it to the top, but an injury cut short his career. Maybe there were other factors, too; I don’t know. I do know his failure to succeed haunted him all the years I knew him.
was born, with a dream of going to the majors. He was a catcher — a good one, I’m told. Good enough that he could have made it to the top, but an injury cut short his career. Maybe there were other factors, too; I don’t know. I do know his failure to succeed haunted him all the years I knew him.
Dad had a fierce passion for baseball. When he was young, he
looked to baseball to fill the empty chasm inside him — one so deep and broad,
he would never find a way to cross it during his life. By the time I was born,
Dad was broken.
Baseball was at the center of my dad’s greatest aspirations
as well as one of his most profound disappointments. Inexplicably, though I
knew so little about him, and had so little in common with him, baseball has
been, for me, an avocation from which I’ve derived great joy and through which
I’ve sought answers and a type of redemption from the past.
Ease his pain. Go the distance.
(Field of Dreams)
(Field of Dreams)
At the age of 20, as an undersized catcher, my father, Jim
Shrode, earned a spot with the Greenville (North Carolina) Greenies, a Level D
ball club in the Coastal Plain League.
During that spring of 1949, Dad was happy. The arrival of
spring meant the start of another baseball season in pinstriped flannels.
Perhaps more importantly, no longer was he living under his alcoholic father’s
roof. Behind him were the days of protecting his mother and two sisters from
his father’s rage. Ahead of him was his dream of playing in the big leagues.
Shortly into that first season, he found himself in Kinston,
North Carolina, as a member of the Kinston Eagles. Surely, he must have
thought, this move brings even more opportunity. His dream was still alive.
Before the season reached the midway point, he was moved again, this time to
the Wilson Tobs.
It was there, in Wilson, North Carolina, that he would throw
his arm out. It was an injury that ended his far-too-brief baseball career. It
was there, appearing in only his tenth professional game, that he would suit up
and take his position behind home plate for the final time, and where he would
step into the box with bat in hand and a dream in his heart for his seventeenth
appearance without a hit. And it was there that he would hang up his glove and
turn in his uniform. At Wilson Municipal Stadium that day, his dream ended.
He rarely spoke of his glory days, or how he almost made it
to the bigs, or how his shot at the major leagues was taken from him. Perhaps
his past was just too painful to think about. So he suppressed his despair,
tucked it away into a corner of his subconscious where it commingled with
memories, heartaches and regrets, eventually to become melancholy.
Self-medication and denial, the only forms of relief he had ever learned, offered
only fleeting comfort.
In Field of Dreams, a voice from the cornfield
whispers to Ray Kinsella, “Ease his pain.”
“Whose pain?” Kinsella responds.
“Your father’s,” I thought, as I watched the scene. “And
your own.”
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