A Perfect Game

“At a time when the World seems to be spinning hopelessly out of control…” Willie Nelson, The Red-Headed Stranger Album

If you’re wanting to read about politics, you won’t find it here. I would just like to share a story that really has no bearing on today’s events, one about childhood and a simpler time. I have to dial it back to about 1973 in the small Fayette County community of Cistern where a group of young boys all around 11-13 years old were playing baseball on the Cistern school grounds. It was hot and dusty but we didn’t really know this. We were just playing ball, being kids - no cell phones, no video games, no internet, no worries, drinking water from garden hoses.

Alocal man who lived next door drove up and watched us for a minute or two and then approached our group to ask if we would be interested in playing a game against another town. It sounded like fun, so we agreed to a contract and he took it from there. A couple of days later, we heard that he had lined up a team of kids from Waelder to be our opponent on the Cistern School field.

Our team held a couple of impromptu practices before the match, but no one in Cistern had ever caught behind the plate with gear on. We had to recruit a kid out of Flatonia who’d been a catcher in Little League, so he was our only ringer. Our manager, the same man who organized the game, said our uniforms would be T-shirts and Bluejeans. With that settled, we were all set to play.

(I must add that after our practices we would ride our bicycles down FM 2237 to hang out under a bridge and smoke some cigarettes that were purloined from someone’s dad. And we had pitched in to get some beer that a local guy (name withheld but we called him Bear, RIP) would bring to us. Bear would drink three and we kids passed around the other three amongst ourselves.)

Apparently word got around and the game became somewhat of an event. APAsystem was set up and we had an announcer. Cars and trucks were backed up to the fence that bordered FM 2237. A couple of local guys served as umpires. People sat in truck beds and brought their own drinks.

I imagine the talk among the crowd centered on rainfall, or lack thereof; cattle prices; gasoline prices; Watergate; perhaps the rumor of closing down that “cat house” in the county.

“What’s a cat house and why are people whispering about it and getting all worked up over it?” we wondered. We kids had no idea why a house full of cats on a ranch that raised chickens caused so much commotion.

We had no expensive bats, just what was laying around. No fancy bags with logos on them. No batting gloves. Not even a pitcher’s mound. I doubt we wore batting helmets. We had to get the game in before sunset because there were no lights and certainly no scoreboard.

But maybe that game was played the way baseball was meant to be played: a bunch of young kids on a dusty, unmanicured field with no worries about the future, no arguments, no gunshots, no videos of parents fighting in the stands. I’m sure each team had its share of errors but who really remembers those? The important thing was parents taking time to gather in a small community and watch their kids be kids.

So that’s one of my favorite childhood memories. Thanks to our manager, Ronnie Beck Sr., for a well-coached game and a perfect record of 1 win / 0 losses for Cistern.

Dale “Willie” Steinhauser, 1st Base