Tuesday, September 12, 2017

I Hope This Isn't His Lucky Bat | The Sound of Summer Running


The photograph was uncredited so I don't know anything of this batter except he must play for Kansas City but we can't see his numbers.  His Zen must completely suck at this moment.


I know almost nothing about baseball but I gather a batter, particularly a good one, may decide this is my lucky bat and, from then on in his career, the supernatural attachment gets steadily stronger.  Perhaps he may have even decided sometimes to hold his lucky bat out of the game so he would have the Luck on reserve for the really big ones.

Baseball bats, I believe, are highly sensitive to where the ball hit them and there are aspects of high finesse needed to hit the ball just right.  Maybe that's like the sweet spot we hear about for tennis racquets and the skilled player needs to use it perfectly to draw all the racquet's power to deliver thrilling serves with excellent control of them.


A batter's lucky bat must mean as much to him as the Galaxy Guitar means to me except he knows his bat may not be able to go the distance with him either because of some fault in his play or some tiny flaw in her.  So long as the Galaxy Guitar receives good care, it's probably not unreasonable to hope to see her still playing in a few centuries or more.


There's a sound unlike any other which comes when you break your axe and it's a most horrible sound which will instantly break your heart because you know that sound couldn't be anything else.  So must it have been with this batter since he would have known from the sound alone his lucky bat was lost.


Zen Yogi:  are you trying to pretend you're some great baseball player?

Yes, I certainly am since maybe we can feel it if we open ourselves enough to the feelings he must have had at that moment.  Meanwhile, we can be relatively sure it was a warm Summer evening for him.  The smell of hotdogs must have made a strong presence in the air and probably beer as well.  There was likely a whole lot of roaring noise coming from the crowd since they felt it too when his bat broke and they heard it.

We don't know the score on the board and maybe this was a high-pressure situation in which a hit would have kept the game alive but now it's lost.  Regardless of the significance of the game, we can see and feel the disbelief in the batter that this could have happened.


Or maybe in just a moment, the batboy will scamper up to him to give a new bat while he takes away the remains of the lucky bat and .... play ball.


Zen Yogi:  I'm developing a powerful appetite for some stadium hot dogs and some cold beer, Silas.

Sorry I can't help you with those, Yogi, but I do love the image.


This article is loosely based on "The Sound of Summer Running" by Ray Bradbury in which he wrote of a kid's love for his sneakers and the story was entirely focused on them.  To get the fullness of the vibe, the kid is probably wearing Keds sneakers and he wears jeans which are rolled up from the ankles to give him room to grow.  He probably wears a simple white t-shirt and he has a crew cut and a sharp-looking kid might have a little bit of Brylcreem so the front of that crew cut stood up.

The time was the late 50s but it continued into the early 60s.  Some of you remember that kid; some of you were that kid.

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