Friday, August 10, 2012

No. 664 – The Heat Goes On

Performer: Asia
Songwriters: John Wetton, Geoff Downes
Original Release: Alpha
Year: 1983
Definitive Version: Asia Enso Kai, 2001. Asiaphiles will complain, but I always preferred the MTV concert version from 1983 that featured a guesting Greg Lake on vocals and bass.

When he was a kid, my friend Steve and his neighborhood crew invented a baseball game called Fungoball. In high school and after, he resurrected it and brought me into the Fungoball circle. We played in Steve’s back yard, and although we didn’t play everyday, there was a run sometime in the summer during the early ’80s when it seemed as though we did.

Fungoball was a simple four-person game. You had two players per side—one pitched, the other played the outfield—and you rotated every other inning. In other words, when your team was in the field, you’d pitch one inning, then play the outfield the next and so on.

Batting was normal: You traded off at bats when your team was up until you used up your three outs. Where you hit the ball determined the result. You had to hit it past the pitcher to get a single (anything that stopped before the pitcher was a foul; anything the pitcher caught was an out).

But Steve’s yard afforded a very narrow chute: On the right was Steve’s house. To the left was a gigantic tree that was a foul if the ball hit it. (It was in play if it went through, which, as I recall, happened only once.) In other words, you had to hit pretty much straight up the middle.

A hit to the bushes in the back of the yard was a double; a hit into the bushes on the fly was a triple and a ball that cleared the bushes was a home run. Did I mention that the back of Steve’s yard abutted a busy street? That’s right: We were whacking balls that at any moment could produce a multicar pileup. When you’re 11, you don’t think of such things. What was our excuse at 18?

I guess the thinking—assuming there was any—was that the ball couldn’t do any real damage. Fungoball was played with a broomstick in a taped off plastic tube and a tennis ball, so it not only was difficult to generate enough power to hit the ball into the street in the first place, even though the bushes were less than 200 feet from home plate, but also impossible to crack a windshield. Still, hearing a thump on your hood while driving has to be disconcerting. Fortunately, in all our games, we never caused any wrecks that I was aware of.

We played with friends whom I had met independently before I started hanging out with Steve, and the teams typically were me and Steve on opposite sides with one of the other guys. This worked for only so long, because the two other guys, who were fiercely competitive brothers, used to argue … ALL … THE … TIME. It would have been comical if it weren’t so ceaseless. After a while, it drove me and Steve nuts, so we joined forces and let the other two deal with each other on their own team.

We played Fungoball heavily for two consecutive summers, and I had polar opposite seasons. One year I hit great—led “the league” in homers as a matter of fact—but couldn’t catch the ball if it had a full tub of Stickum on it. The next, I literally allowed zero runs as a pitcher and didn’t make a single error but couldn’t hit Steve Cauthen’s weight.

I determined that my problem in the field the first year was my mitt. The tennis ball always bounced off it on grounders back to the “mound,” so I finally ditched it much to Steve’s consternation, but I never booted another ball after that, so you go with what works.

Meanwhile, the year before, I had a Ruthian achievement, except the Bambino never hit four homers in a game. No one had ever hit four homers in a single Fungoball game—even allowing for the fact that you typically got 30 at bats over the course of the six-inning affair—but I had the range and the swing working one day and cleared the bushes four times. Let me tell you, few things are more satisfying than seeing that tennis ball take the big hop off the Reed Road pavement after a bomb.

When the game—and the arguments—concluded, we typically adjourned to Steve’s kitchen to grab a pop and hang out on the screened-in porch to the side. In the kitchen, Steve had his artwork hanging on the refrigerator like a kindergartener.

But Steve had become quite a sketcher, working in pencil off photography of his favorite subjects. He had a particularly excellent drawing of Dan Fouts from his beloved San Diego Chargers in action and not one but two pics of Asia, his favorite band during the Fungoball days.

Those were good days.

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