Every August, when monarch wings beat air thick as cake batter, we gather around a diamond of green grass and brown dirt in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. We pack wooden bleachers, we unfold camp chairs, we slide down flattened cardboard boxes, we park cars on lawns that have duct-taped signs to mailboxes: “All Day Parking $25,” and we anticipate the echoed crack of a leather ball against an aluminum bat. The arms that swing the bat are still poles not yet twined with adult muscle. The arms rattle loose uniform sleeves with “Little League” patches. Yet these arms bench press the weight of adult hopes from the stands and folding aluminum chairs and, through the other end of ESPN’s camera lens, from living room couches and recliners around the world.
Cleats, carefully packed at home and transported in duffel bag by plane and car and bus to Williamsport, step up to the white plate. The plate dusted by a man in black and white stripes and a cage mask who had to fold over his beer belly and mutter excuses for his farts and popping knees.
The batter helmet looks up, looks over the pitcher, over the American flag flapping by the far fence, over the hill cresting a green wave of deciduous Pennsylvania trees to the August blue beyond. Beyond is Lancaster, the hometown cheering with posters, fireworks, black plastic letters on the Dairy Queen drive-thru, and beyond that the South Carolina team, the opponents, and they too have the hometown fans and fanfare and a Dairy Queen with hurrahs, and beyond that, spin the globe, there’s Brazil, the next opponent team with boys in the locker room palms sweatily squeezing bats, and spin the globe again to find Japan with hometowns but no Dairy Queens, and those boys also are here in bunk beds with bats and helmets and muscles attempting to heft the world’s hopes in the World Series.
The eyes under the helmet see all of this, and hands, which otherwise hold pencils in eighth grade social studies and a video controller in Fortnite, grip the gummy tape around the bat’s handle tighter in preparation for what arm muscles must do next.
There is the crushing roar of the crowd’s expectation, but also. Also, there is a lawnmower whining beyond this green grass, because there is a man whose lawn is long and must be mowed, like it must be mowed every week of every August. Just as unrelenting, every August, we gather because a ball must be hit, and, somewhere, on some couch or recliner, someone must lean forward, gasp in cake batter air as a ball sails beyond the fence, carrying all hopes, bases loaded around the world, home.
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