The other evening as I was coming home from a meeting, I drove by a Little League baseball game. It was good to see all the young kids playing ball and lots of parents gathered around cheering for their team.
As I drove on, it brought back memories of when I and a great many of my friends and buddies played baseball. We started in April back then and didn’t finish until late July.
Of course, those were the days when we didn’t get out of school for the summer until late May and we started back usually the day after Labor Day.
In the past several days I sort of started looking around for some of the old photos from back then and found a few.
I was looking for a particular photo that had been taken of me during my second grade year in school which was near the start of the baseball season. I couldn’t quite remember what it said, so I searched and fortunately somehow found it.
It had been printed in the Daily Oklahoman, it was a photo of me swinging a bat. Underneath the photo it read, “Bigger and Better than ever will be the annual YMCA junior baseball program which swings underway here this week. Raring to go along with hordes of other youngsters is Michael J. McCormick, taking a cut that may strike terror in the hearts of opposing pitchers.”
I’m not sure about that statement that I ever struck terror in the hearts of any pitcher as long as I played the game, but I really enjoyed Little League baseball and always looked forward to it each spring and summer.
On another note, how and why I was chosen out of all the other players on my team to have my photo taken by the photographer that day I’ll never know. But some family member, probably dad or my mother, clipped it out of the paper and kept it.
Baseball, even though I considered myself only an average player, was a big deal to me and my buddies back in those days.
I started playing baseball in the second grade and continued playing through the summer at the end of my sophomore year in high school. It just seemed like it was the normal thing to do, even after I began working in the summers after my freshman and sophomore years.
But I had to work part-time during school in addition to the summers beginning my junior year and was busy with other extracurricular activities which became a priority.
I dabbled with trying out for the St. Gregory’s College baseball team my freshman year but gave that up quickly when I realized that was beyond my capabilities.
Still, I look back today and am so glad I had the opportunities to play as long as I did.