In the mid-1960s, there was a pro baseball pitcher named Eric Zorn who was so dazzling on the mound that no batter ever claimed the $1,000 standing offer to anyone who tagged him for a clean base hit.
Zorn also was a silky receiver who specialized in circus catches for an undefeated pro football team. And during basketball season, this astounding athlete led an invincible barnstorming squad against all comers, almost always pulling out the games himself with miracle shots as time expired.
You have not previously read of his exploits because Zorn’s baseball triumphs occurred in the unheralded throw-the-ball-against-the-front-porch-s teps league; his football triumphs in the toss-the-ball-in-the-air-and-fall-down-while-you’re-catching-it league (backyard division); and his basketball triumphs in the all-alone-in-the-driveway league.
5-4-3-2-1….Haaaaaaaaaaaah!
Pro sports fantasies. I’ve had them all. It’d be hard to find a guy who hasn’t; a guy so resigned to his own limitations that he has never done play-by-play in his own head as he scores the winning goal in some imaginary contest, sinks a putt to win a make-believe tournament or earns a perfect 10 in a pretend exhibition of skill; a guy who has never, quietly, imitated the delirious roar of thousands of fans with that breathy exhalation from high in the throat.
Reality usually sets in early. I gave up the idea of ever being a pro football player when I was 13 and the coaches told me I wasn’t tough enough to be a starter on the 8th-grade team. The pro basketball fantasy evaporated senior year in high school when only a handful of very minor colleges expressed very minor interest in having me play for them.
In pro football and basketball, the stars tend to be enormous genetic aberrations or as twitchy quick as waterbugs or both. But baseball is different. Baseball players tend to be normal size. They sometimes get soft in the middle and gray at the temples. The greatest legend of all, Babe Ruth, was a swollen libertine.
So the baseball fantasy tends to linger. In my case, even though I was never much good after moving up from the throw-the-ball-against-the-front-porch-steps league into contests involving other people, my pro baseball dreams didn’t really die until just a few years ago. I finally admitted to myself that, with a family, a job, a mortgage and creeping age all conspiring against me, there really was no chance I’d ever find time to hone my knuckler and other weak-armed junkballs in order to cut a swath through the major leagues.
This is the special charm of baseball: Despite high ticket prices, buccaneer owners, obscene salaries and disloyal, crybaby players, it is a sport that still seems like it’s within reach, or just barely out of it. Those who could never dream of absorbing a hit from Lawrence Taylor or slam-dunking over David Robinson can still imagine practicing in the batting cage and then taking Jack McDowell downtown.
Baseball purists will snort that this is a delusion. Hitting a 90-mile-an-hour fastball, they’ll say, is the most difficult feat in all of sport and requires a lifetime of practice, blah blah blah.
They may well be right, but I’m hoping Michael Jordan proves they’re not. I’m counting on him to succeed in his announced plan to go to spring training and earn a spot on the White Sox roster, not for his greater glory but for us Walter Mittys out here who don’t want to believe that pro sports are the sole province of those who-like these disputatious figure skaters now so much in the news-have trained with fierce single-mindedness since they were just out of diapers.
Jordan already did something similar when he became the greatest basketball player in history after having been cut from his high school team. This turnaround may have given false hope to every team reject in America, but false hope, let’s face it, is the life’s blood of sport.
I don’t want to think of baseball as some high, unreachable art form that even one of the most splendid athletes ever cannot master. I want Michael Jordan to take down those baseball snobs who sniff that a 30-year-old who hasn’t played since high school will never learn to execute the hit and run, throw to the cutoff man, go inside out on a curveball or solve the riddles of the slider and the splitfinger.
I’m hoping he dumbfounds the overserious baseball worshipers, the ones who kept Minnie Minoso off the diamond last fall because they thought his appearance in a meaningless game would be a distraction to their sacred sport and the fragile psyches of its stars, and the ones who are now bleating that Jordan isn’t even worthy of the minor leagues.
But if he fails, well, he’s always welcome at spring training in the throw-the-ball-against-the-front-porch-steps league.
I’m still unhittable and we still get great crowds: Haaaaaaaaaaaah!
