A wooden Louisville Slugger stands in the corner next to my family’s front door.
Black electrical tape wraps much of the bat’s handle. And then some. It squeezes tight a hairline that fissured during batting practice with my dad one day. I was, I don’t know, eight years old? Ten?
Gnash marks softened by time divot the barrel. From when I was swinging the bat against the trunk of the tree that shaded home plate in our side yard. Home plate being a dirt patch misshapen by wear and indifference.
This was the bat I so proudly carried with me to our small town’s middle-slash-high school cafeteria one summer evening to have it signed by Don Newcombe. I’d cut short my day’s sweaty, dusty play outside and had showered. My hair was still wet and reasonably combed as I stood in line with my parents to meet the man who sat behind a table, signing others’ thises and thats.
Don Newcombe seemed like an old man from my youthful vantage point. But I’d been told he was a former Major League Baseball player. Not one whose name I knew, to be certain.
He wasn’t Ozzie Smith or Vince Coleman or a roster’s weight of St. Louis Cardinals I could name at that time. Nor anyone else whose baseball card I had traded away or for with a neighbor.
But a professional baseball player visiting our rural northern Missouri town was rare. Actually, I knew of no other instance. So we took what we got.
“Don Newcombe” (AI-generated image, using DreamStudio)
When my turn came at the table where kids typically sat for their school lunches, I presented my bat to the man who would sign it. Or try to. He did his best while kindly explaining to me that the lacquer that coats wooden baseball bats makes it difficult to do. I took what I got.
In the years that followed, I’d learn more about Don Newcombe. I’d learn that he was one of the first black players in the MLB. Ninth, actually. Being signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson.
He would be the first black pitcher to start a World Series game (1949) and the first to win 20 games in a season (1951). He would be the first pitcher to win the Rookie of the Year (1949), Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Awards (1956) during his career. A feat only matched once since, by Justin Verlander (2011).
Knowing this, I’m now sheepish to note, the sins gashed in the barrel of the bat came after Don Newcombe signed it that rare summer evening. I didn’t know better.
Oddly enough, it’s quite possibly the only “toy” I ever treated in such a dismissive childlike way. I had little to claim, in general. The ever-present message when I received anything as a child was to take great care with my belongings, for there would be no replacing them.
So why had I damaged that bat like that? I wish I could say, but I do not know. I suppose it’s a tinge ironic that that Louisville Slugger now is one of the rare material possessions I still hold from my childhood. But I do so consciously.
It stands in the corner within reach of the front door, where myself, my wife and our two sons, both older than the age I was when Don Newcombe signed that lacquered bat, pass by it many times a day.
Not for security against would-be intruders, as its location in the house might imply. Not for any particular reason at all. Rather, just because. Or at least, I’ve yet to figure out my reasoning for it.
Maybe it’s to let it have a place that’s visible to me. But nothing fancy like encasing it in lucite and displaying it on a shelf or on the wall.
Maybe, odd as it might be, it’s to remember Don Newcombe. Because I do. And in a more proper light than I knew to see him when I was a damp-haired little white boy asking a graying black man who’d known a life I never would to sign my baseball bat in that small-town school’s cafeteria.
An unassuming treasure with a story I recall every time I look at that corner.
The Bat is #Fourteen in the weekly memoir series, Among Other Things. What’s it about? Read Introducing ‘Among Other Things,’ A Weekly Memoir Series.
