The Girl at the Batting Cages

             Clare would sneak into the 70- and 75-mph batting cages by the time she was eleven.  By the summer before freshman year high school, she was hitting at the 80-mph cage, and I was looking for a place with faster machines.  That place doesn’t exist, at least around here.

            After all these years of work, my daughter’s stance is a thing of beauty.  Clare bats right-handed, spreads her feet a little and puts her front foot tippy-toe; she will crouch ever so slightly waiting for the ball.  The hands are fast, the swing short and explosive.  For as long as I can remember, people have stopped to watch.  Boys her age mostly stare, or glare.  Girls aren’t supposed to hit with power.

            And to do this at Stella’s, no less.  Nothing comes easy there, not with yellow-coated balls flying out of a background of yellow corrugated plastic.  You can expect to hear one of three sounds at Stella’s—Splat! Boing! or Thwack!  The first is the ball hitting a rubber square of a strike zone suspended on fencing behind the batter; swing and a miss or take a pitch, the ball goes Splat!  The second sound comes from a ball hitting one of two floor-to-ceiling metal roof supports.  And the third is a ball hitting the padding on the lower half of the supports.  When she’s in a groove, Clare goes Boing-Thwack! Boing-Thwack! Boing-Thwack! ten swings for a dollar.  Splats! are few and far between.

            After next spring, I’ll have no reason to go to Stella’s, except maybe for the pepper and egg sandwich their kitchen makes during Lent.  No more paying Clare $1 every time she managed to hit the ball fair ten or eleven times on a token.  (Inflation means fewer swings now for the buck.)  No more entering her in hitting contests in seventh and eighth grade to show a bunch of strangers what she could do.  No more high school batting practice, when she complained that 70-mph was “too slow.”  And no more of this, going on a Wednesday afternoon in late July with fall ball starting up in another six weeks.  Oh, did I mention she was the first girl to break a demo bat at Stella’s?  They let her keep it as a souvenir.

***          

            With the White Sox trading Jake “I talk a good game” Peavy last night, my daughter sat on the living room couch last night working three screens, laptop, cellphone and T.V; she wanted to know who exactly was coming and who was going, ahead of MLB Network if possible.  Clare will either make a good general manager or a story-breaking reporter.  For any number of reasons, I prefer the former.  We’ll see.