PROJECTS — [PART 6] Travels with Dad

Second Best by RANDY FERTEL

For the summer of 1959 I was the ninth player on the second best 10-year-olds baseball team in New Orleans. Well, maybe I wasn’t the worst since I played left field and everyone knows that in little league the worst player is always exiled to right where balls are seldom hit. I played left and batted 8th. A year older, my brother Jerry caught and he was terrific. He batted 3rd before the cleanup Bobby Larson who was this humungous red-faced left-hander with a wicked fastball and curve both, and awesome control.

Maybe it’s because our coach Dave Adamson was so good but we were pretty precocious. Imagine: double plays around the horn at 10 years old: Brad Kelly to Dave Murey to Dennis Arruberina—who we called “A Rubber Weenie” because it was too hard not to and for his long stretch: 5-4-3. And I remember once watching Bobby Larson hum 3 quick strikes past a little tyke before he could dig in and before his coach could call time or wave the kid out of the batter’s box. One, two, three, yer out, before he knew what hit him. Pretty ruthless stuff.

Baseball was the one bright spot on an otherwise dark field. Children of divorce, Jerry and I hadn’t much in common except hurt and a need to expunge it somehow. In the mid-50s the kids pain wasn’t on the table. We worked it out on our own, mostly with our fists. Siblings who knew one another’s buttons, we fought constantly, viciously, bloodily. I learned years later from Roger Bernstein who lived down the alley, now a lawyer, that one of the neighborhood entertainments began with the announcement that, “hey, the Fertel brothers are fighting, let’s go watch.” I’m glad someone enjoyed it. My memory, selective no doubt, tells me that Jerry always won.

Later, Jerry would finish high-school in the Army before a tour of duty as a medic in the Mekong; I would go on to college, a deferment, and a tour of duty as an anti-war protestor in Washington D.C.

Well-coached, we were out to win and win we did. I say second best team with some authority because we came in second in the city championship that year. I’m afraid I must report that it was my dropping a simple pop fly out there in left in the 9th inning of the championship game that made it so. Give me too much time to think about something and I’m sure to flub it and that pop-up just looped so slow and languid that I had all the time to imagine the consequences of failing my teammates, and I did.

The next year Coach Dave broke my heart when he left me behind with the 10-year-olds and Jerry and Bobby and the rest moved up to the 11-year-olds, to a city championship and a trip to Atlanta for the nationals where they made the finals. I got to be batboy and ride my first train and sit in the dugout. But as the great Kansas City 3rd baseman, George Brett, once said with Sophoclean simplicity in the locker room after the Royals lost the playoffs, “There is no consolation.”

After that I became a catcher like my brother. All reaction, no time to think behind the plate. But never again on a great team. And never again blessed with a great coach.

Years later when a promotion caused my picture to be published in the Times Picayune, I received a clipping and a very sweet note from an older gentleman who wrote to say that he remembered me in little league and thought I was the best catcher he had ever seen. I assumed he had me confused with my brother. But I have the note tucked away still. I didn’t write to correct him. Like Jake says to Lady Brett at the end of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

Recently I was thinking about that blooper in left and it occurred to me to mention it to my brother at the dinner table. He was 51 at the time to my 50. “Jerry,” I said, “you know, I was thinking about that pop fly I dropped and thinking maybe over the years I had blown it all out of proportion—maybe it wasn’t such a big deal.”

We probably hadn’t mentioned it since 1959 but Jerry needed no further reminder. The image of that fly ball plopping in slow motion to the ground was all it took.

Yet another Sophocles, all he said was, “No. It was.”