My Baseball Family

Three months before she would have turned one hundred, we buried my great-grandma. We'd buried my great-grandpa twenty years prior, but his tombstone still looked new, brightened by the flowers my grandma brought him every few weeks. The baseballs carved into the stone were still white.

The pastor looked askance at the nontraditional tombstone next to the plot he presided over but pushed on. My great-grandma's forty-odd descendants stifled a collective grin. "Hazel was a devoted member of our congregation. She attended every Sunday for decades. Her … faithful husband always dropped her off." He glanced at the tombstone again. "But he never stayed, because he was always on his way to the ball field." The descendants broke into laughter while the churchgoing non-relatives looked on disapprovingly. The great-grandchildren who were old enough to remember Larry Yocky's 1997 funeral grinned at each other, wondering how the pastor would react when we told him our great-grandpa had left instructions that we sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" as he was lowered into the earth.

Like many baseball families, mine prides itself on its many generations of ballplayers (the boys play baseball, the girls play softball). Mine especially prides itself on my great-grandpa's legacy; not only was he a great player but he also coached Pony League in Long Beach for over thirty years, including two World Series championships that led to a field being named after him. A few of his players made it to the big leagues, including Bobby Grich, and it's still weirdly gratifying to hear another SoCal native delightedly recall watching Larry Yocky coach.

Like most kids with the pressure of a legacy, my cousins and I pushed ourselves to be the most worthy of it. We all started T-ball at age four, and every holiday included Wiffle ball in our grandparents' backyard. We spent our summers chasing Grandpa's pop-ups until we all collapsed in a sweaty, sunburned, laughing pile and Grandma brought us popsicles. We watched the Cal State Long Beach Dirtbags from our grandparents' seats just behind home plate, charting the progress of future major leaguers like Troy Tulowitzki, Evan Longoria, and Jered Weaver. During every game, we cousins found our own ways to compete: who could pursue the most foul balls (if you brought it to the concessions stand you got a free Coke!), who could eat the most jalapeños, who could get a player to wave back to them, who could run the bases the fastest on glorious Sunday afternoons when kids could take the field after the game. As we ran the bases on a college field, we all imagined it was our turn at the Big Show. Like most baseball kids who grow up in southern California, Vin Scully narrated our dreams.

My sister and I spent as much time as possible at our grandparents' house, lost in the sweet idyll of childhood: bare feet on the lawn, well-worn gloves at the ready, ponytails jutting out of our Angels caps as we chased after whatever balls Grandpa hit for us. When we needed more room, we walked to the field named after Great-Grandpa, and Grandpa hit dozens of buckets of balls until it got dark. I learned second base like a language and loved it like a friend, more comfortable there than I was anywhere. With my sister at shortstop, we were unstoppable. We watched A League of their Own at least once a week and wore both skirts and eye black. Ever-diligent tomboys, we recorded Angels games so that we could pause and rewind our favorite plays. We rewatched Adam Kennedy and David Eckstein turn double plays thousands of times, mimicking their actions and practicing our flips until we could both throw and catch a regular or backhanded flip with our eyes closed. (A few facial injuries may have occurred in the perfecting of these flips). In our rec league games, we turned double plays achievable only with the smooth magic of sibling telepathy and hours of backyard instruction under Grandpa's...