The Sound of the Bat, and: A Few Meditations on the Tightly-Wound Baseball

The Sound of the Bat, and: A Few Meditations on the Tightly-Wound Baseball Bill Meissner (bio) The Sound of the Bat The sound of a wooden bat hitting a baseball is so sharp and resonant that if you close your eyes, you can almost see it, like a flash of light. The bat hitting the ball is not like the soft, gentle sound of an egg cracking. It’s the sound you hear when lightning parts the air for a split second, and the sky claps its hands. It surprises the sleeping air around home plate, wakes the grass blades of a whole sandlot field, startles an entire stadium. Its jolting alarm starts the game, sets everything into motion: fielders, ump, baserunners. Like the starting gun at a race, it signals the batter to sprint down the first base line; it lifts fans and onlookers to their feet. It’s sudden, like the wings of a startled thrush as it bursts from a branch. It’s the explosion of polished wood striking fast-pitched leather. It’s a sound you feel as much as hear, a sound that echoes deep in your chest, especially if you’re close to home plate. When a batter swings and the bat shatters, it’s not the same. It’s a sad, splintering sound, like a bone breaking, or a dead tree limb falling to the hard ground. But the solid hit—oh, the solid hit: the batter feels its vibration in his hands and wrists and forearms and all the way down to his roots. The crack of the bat: Baseball’s punctuation. Its heartbeat. Its music. A shot that, sometimes, is heard around the world. It’s when all time begins and ends. If Albert Einstein were in the stands, he’d hear the sound of the bat and calculate energy and distance. He’d tell you exactly how long it would take a long home run—if it kept on flying—to reach the stars. [End Page 137] A Few Meditations on the Tightly- Wound Baseball The tightly-wound baseball is the ball that always seems to poke a hole in the sky when you hit it. It’s the ball, in Little League, that gives you your Magic Swing, flying farther than you’ve ever hit a baseball before. There’s a logical explanation for the tight-wound, of course. Perhaps the climate was unusually hot in Haiti, or Costa Rica, or perhaps the women in the baseball factory were upset with their husbands or frazzled by their children, angry at the looseness of the world. On a specific morning at one spool, a woman wound the yarn tighter than she’s ever wound it before, tugging at it with each rotation until the pain subsided, and in its place appeared a perfect, firm sphere. The tight-wound is the baseball that spins during your afternoon nap; sometimes it unwinds as it spins, spooling out yards of blue yarn, but by the time you wake, it will have rewound itself, slipped its leather clothes back on and sealed them again, seamlessly, with red stitches. The true tight-wound can be sensed by an uneasy pitcher as he squeezes and rotates it with his hand; the true tight-wound speaks to the lines on the palm. When a pitcher senses the taut leather of a tight-wound between his fingers, he wishes he could toss it away among the tall weeds. But for the batter, the tight-wound is prized. He wants to see it rotating with that flip-flopping smile. The batter’s eyes widen as the ball reaches the plate, and for just one instant, wood falls in love with leather as his bat meets it and sends it up, up, up, high enough to land in the bleachers of his dreams. [End Page 138] Bill Meissner Bill Meissner’s novel, Spirits in the Grass, about a ballplayer who discovers the remains of an ancient Native American burial ground on a baseball field, is available in print and e-book from the University of Notre Dame Press. His baseball short story collection, Hitting into the Wind (Random House...

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