The Home Team

As boys, my brothers were mad about baseball. And I helped feed the family obsession.

Bred for Baseball

Every one of my five younger brothers was bred to play baseball. Before they were even old enough to seriously practice, they spent hours in our backyard in Columbus, Ohio, preparing for the sound of the fans going wild. "Ahhhhh!" they'd gasp, bowing their heads, clenching their fists and stretching their arms toward heaven. The raspy, wheezing sound approximated the distant roar of fans behind Red Barber's voice on the radio.

These broadcasts contributed to our neighbors' ongoing exasperation with us. The sound of fans would erupt with no apparent provocation.

"Yeahhhhh!" said the swing set. "Haaaaaaaa," said the whirligig.

"What could they be doing over there?" asked one of our neighbors.

"Molly, can't you keep them quiet?" pleaded my mother, Virginia, who unofficially dubbed me, her oldest child, Deputy Mom.

"Please, you guys," I would say.

But my brothers would become a team of commentators. They'd race to the giant spruce in our front yard and scramble up. The tree was their radio tower. The spruce swayed. Boughs snapped.

"Did you see that? What a shot by O'Neill!"

"He had some wood on that one, O'Neill did!"

"What a hitter! O'Neill won the Series!"

An elderly man named Mr. Walter lived next door to us on Schreyer Place. A gardener specializing in delphiniums, he also had beds of foxglove, Shirui lilies, poppies and Japanese irises -- tall, fragile flowers that were especially vulnerable to the balls that sailed over his fence as soon as my brothers were old enough to launch them.

A religious man, Mr. Walter did his best to forgive. He'd toss the balls back over, snip his broken blooms and place them on the altar to the Blessed Virgin near his garage.

"I gotta hand it to him," said my father, Charles, who was known as Chick. "He's no hypocrite."

As time went on, though, Mr. Walter lost his capacity for forgiveness. After rescuing the offending sphere, he'd remove it to his house. Perhaps he thought himself up against a finite supply of baseballs. Of course, he wasn't.

After my dad found a stadium in Plain City where my brothers could play, he began buying Spalding baseballs by the case. "The poor old thing," said my mother, staring out the kitchen window as Mr. Walter scurried after yet another baseball.

Meanwhile, my parents seemed oblivious to the mafia spirit that had been growing among my brothers.

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