And Then Someday Was Yesterday

Around nineteen years ago, on a springlike day in early March, my daughter Jen, as part of a high school photography project, accompanied Hannah and me to a local baseball field, where she told me to relive my youthful days as a high school baseball player. As she snapped photos on her 35-millimeter camera, I recreated a moment of transcendence in the long arc of my life when I played baseball as if it were the most important thing in the world. From age seven to eighteen, from Little League through High School, I played the game with youthful abandon, and dreamed, like millions of other young American boys, that someday I would play in the major leagues.

Jen was inspired by a scene in the movie Field of Dreams (or, for literary purists, the novel Shoeless Joe) when Ray Kinsella talks with Archibald “Moonlight” Graham late at night and asks about his short-lived baseball career. Doc Graham was an old man at this point, but fifty years earlier, he had been a talented baseball player. He played three seasons in the minor leagues before the New York Giants called and allowed him to achieve his lifelong ambition of reaching the big leagues. In his short stint with the team, he played only one inning, as a defensive replacement in right field, and never got the chance to bat.

In Field of Dreams, Graham was portrayed by Burt Lancaster, who told Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) that, at season’s end, rather than enduring another year in the minors, he hung up his cleats and returned to his hometown of Chisolm, Minnesota, to become a family doctor. (In real life, Graham played four more seasons in the minor leagues, even as he pursued his medical degree). When Kinsella asked Graham what it was like to come so close to his dream and then have it pass him by, Graham answered, “We just don't recognize life's most significant moments while they're happening. Back then I thought, ‘Well, there'll be other days.’ I didn't realize that that was the only day.”

For me, that was the most impactful line of the film, because it captured the improvidence of youth when we fail to recognize that the seemingly uneventful decisions we make early on influence much of our life’s journey. Every choice we make, every path we choose along the way opens and closes doors of opportunity. This is not necessarily unwelcome or undesired. For Doc Graham and the people of Chisolm, Minnesota, his choosing medicine over baseball improved the lives of hundreds of families for the next fifty years.

Kinsella later asks Graham, “If you had one wish, what would it be?” As Graham contemplated the question, one sensed that his mind wandered back to a time when, for a fleeting moment, he followed his dreams. Graham replied:

I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big-league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn't. That's what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases - stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag… That is my wish!

The scene acknowledged the human capacity to dream of what might have been, even when the choices we make improve our outcomes. For every path we take, there are lost dreams and lost opportunities.

Jen used the quote in her photography project and had me play the role of Doc Graham, a man past his prime who contemplates the lost opportunities and dreams that passed him by. It was an easy role for me. My baseball life was more short-lived and less successful than Doc Graham’s. Although I intended to play baseball in college, when I went off to Wittenberg, my priorities changed. I began to value academics and other pursuits. Baseball was suddenly less important. The world became larger, and I wanted to see what was there.

Not unlike Doc Graham, my decision to bypass baseball worked out well, leading to a fulfilling career in law, government, and business for which I am grateful. But nearly fifty years later, I can still feel occasional pangs of regret, not because I continued to harbor hopes of becoming a professional ballplayer—I knew better by then—but because I missed out on four more years of playing baseball with fellow travelers and sharing a sense of camaraderie and purpose that only a true lover of the game can appreciate.

Later in life, amidst the stresses and anxieties, challenges and excitement of a professional legal career, my thoughts sometimes wandered to more carefree days when my brother and I invented differing versions of backyard baseball, from sock ball to wiffle ball to groundball games played on bumpy brown grass on hot summer afternoons. And I sometimes questioned my decision at the age of eighteen to not even try for a few more years of enraptured joy, the feeling a ballplayer experiences as he anticipates that day’s game and throws a ball with a teammate to loosen up before the start of play. Had I forgotten the smell of freshly cut grass and dirt, and the pure sound of the ball landing firmly in the pocket of my first baseman’s mitt? Did I no longer appreciate the air, wind, and sun pounding my face as I endured the challenges and setbacks, losses and failures and occasional triumphs, which are the beautiful American game? In my rush to adulthood, did I too easily dismiss the wonderment of baseball in my life?

I never thought much about growing old when I was young. Few of us ever do. I can still recall, at seven years old, impatiently wishing I were an older version of myself. I ached for responsibility, to prove myself worthy. When at the age of twelve my dad finally shifted summer lawn-mowing duty from my brother to me, I considered it a step toward manhood. Every Saturday, weather permitting, I filled the lawnmower’s gas tank, checked its oil, and pulled the chord (usually two or three times before it started) to begin this important task, which I assumed was essential to the security of the free world. And I did so with pride. The more sweat, dirt, and grit, the better.

In later years, only when I had to cut the grass at houses of my own, did I start to question why I had so enthusiastically embraced this tiresome and time-consuming chore. Now, it was simply something that had to be done during the precious few hours every weekend when I could relax. Eventually, I sold my lawnmower, hired a landscaper, and recaptured some lost time.

In my youth, I looked forward to the future, believing the best of life was ahead of me. I dreamed of exploring places that would expand my horizons beyond the limited confines of suburban New Jersey and southern Ohio. Armed with a college education that opened my mind to economics, history, and literature, I wished to experience life’s diversity and compete in the arena. And for the past forty years, I have done my best to live life with passion and gusto.

Like Doc Graham, although I would have liked to have stared down a big-league pitcher, I could not now imagine a different life, one that did not include law school, a career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and later as a managing director of a prestigious consulting firm, where I investigated police departments, corporate malfeasance, and the high profile problems confronting university presidents. My career has affected the lives of many people and invested in me responsibilities I never imagined as a sixteen-year-old first baseman picking rushed throws in the dirt from fellow infielders. I am blessed and grateful for the life I have led, and for the life, love, and family I have. For those choices, I have no regrets, and would not change anything.

But whenever I come across a local high school or college game at the park near our house, I stop to watch, if only for a few minutes, so I can take in the sights and sounds of the game as it was played when I was young, with innocence, pure joy, and a love for the game. “If this sounds like a romantic or foolish impulse to us today,” wrote Roger Angell in Let Me Finish (Harcourt, 2006), “it is because most of American life, including baseball, no longer feels feasible. We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats, and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it.”

When we are young, we think the future is ours for the making, that time is unlimited. We look forward to someday, when we will master the art of life, accomplish important things, better the world, leave our mark, and build a legacy. “Someday,” I used to tell myself, “I will write the great American novel.” “Someday, I will travel the world and embrace new countries and cultures and ways of life.” And when I was still young enough to dream, I said, “Someday, I will play professional baseball.” And then, one day I woke up and realized that someday was yesterday. Where time was once on my side, suddenly it vanished.

Today, whenever I am at a major league game, I pay attention to the players between innings, when the first baseman tosses groundballs to the infielders, the pitcher throws his warmups, and the outfielders play long toss. I sometimes imagine what it must be like to play at that level, and how I would have loved to have had that chance. But then I realize a painful and obvious truth, one understood by all of us dreamers and recognized by Roger Angell more than sixty years ago for The New Yorker, “that we never made it. We would never know the rich joke that doubled over three young pitchers in front of the dugout; we would never be part of that golden company on the field, which each of us, certainly for one moment of his life, had wanted more than anything else in the world to join.”