When I was a kid, man, did I love baseball! Loved everything about it. I studied stats for hours. I stared at pictures of great players. I collected baseball cards. I dreamed of playing baseball, dreamed of the sound of the ball smacking an oiled mitt, the crack of a bat, the cheers.

Unfortunately, when it came to actually playing baseball, I stunk. I was so small I could barely hold the bat off my back shoulder. My swing was awkward, as was my gait around the base path. I couldn’t catch for a damn, either. And despite hours of practice with my usually impatient father, I wasn’t getting any better. However, my father and I persisted. Take that boy out of right field, we dreamed! Put him at the top of the order! Let him smack a few dingers over that chain-link fence!

One afternoon while my family was visiting my grandparents in New Jersey, my dad took me out into the backyard for some baseball practice. That day’s lesson: learning how to dodge an errant pitch. Now, despite the fact that I rarely connected with the ball, I still got on base frequently, mostly due to the fact that the pitchers were wild and my strike zone was practically nonexistent. But I was getting hit by a lot of pitches. And to make matters worse, I usually cried after I got beaned; and that was embarrassing for all involved.

So, there I was in the backyard, my bat on my shoulder, dodging pitches from my father thrown intentionally at my person. Now, around this time I had the strange penchant for placing a blade of grass in between my lips and occasionally chewing on it. I guess this was my substitute for chewing tobacco or sunflower seeds. Anyway, my dad threw a wild pitch, which headed straight for my helmetless head. I jerked away, stumbled, and fell on the grass. It just so happened that when I hit the ground, I managed to swallow that blade of grass in between my lips. Except, I soon realized due to a peculiar scratching in my throat, that I didn’t completely swallow the grass. In fact, as I soon realized upon going inside and looking in the mirror, that the blade of grass was stuck, yes stuck, to my uvula (usually referred to by many as “that hangey thing in the back of your throat”).

And no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the grass unstuck. I tried drinking copious amounts of water. I tried eating and swallowing excessively. I even tried to pull it out with my fingers, but, of course, this proved impossible because doing so made me gag. Unbelievable, my family collectively groaned. Another embarrassment, another baseball failure.

Ultimately, I had to go to our family doctor who, after proclaiming he had never seen anything like it, took out a pair of lengthy tweezers and effortlessly removed the blade of grass from my uvula.

I never did get any better at baseball, and I hung up my cleats for good after one last embarrassing season where I batted a mean .000 (yes, I never actually got a hit).

P.S. Go Phillies!

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