Hunting for a Hero

Tom Cruise makes one or two film appearances a year. A baseball player can be the hero or the goat one hundred and sixty two times.

As an English major it is appropriate that my quote about what makes a hero come from a retired baseball player, Hall of Famer, Dave Winfield. I particularly enjoy this quote now (he said it in the early 1990's) because not only is Dave Winfield like 6 foot 6 and a mountain of a man, but the idea of Tom Cruise as a "hero" is almost as comical as the image I have in my head of Winfield standing next to Cruise, Cruise with his puckered, smushed, smug mug muttering "Matt... Matt...You don't know history" appearing so impish and elfish, looking like something Winfield found squashed under his shoe.

But the scholar in me is reminded that, like Jim Morrison stated, many of my heroes are actually artists and writers, and so it is here I remember Oscar Wilde quipped, "In every first novel the hero is either the author as Christ or Faust."

And that is reason number 200, 212 why I have not written a novel. I could never live up to that.

But I do have a story to tell about a new hero in the making. And while I have so many rants I could use here, the beautiful and talented Rayne Droplet would prefer this to be light, so I will skip the anti-war prattle for the day and talk instead about Hunter's Second Giants' game.

As usual we arrived early and having learned a few things from the first game, we were actually early enough for Giants' batting practice. The plan was to take a baseball Heather had received at a previous game and see if Hunter Pence, the Astros new young star, would sign the ball for our new young star. Then I saw the Astros had taken the field.

And so Heather was left comfortably reclining in a luxury box with her pre-game meal and a foot massage while Hunter and I were ordered to go hang out in our seats to give her a moment of peace. They are really doing great things to make the park more fan-friendly nowadays.

Uh, really, what actually happened was poor Heather was ditched in a wake of peanut shell dust and Cracker Jack wrappers as I scurried Hunter down the right field line, leaving Heather somewhere behind home-plate tethered to the stroller.

Hunter and I had to go down the right-field line because that is where our seats are and they don't allow you in the preferred section if you are not preferred, no matter how cute and properly dressed your baby is. I thought I might sneak around when I saw Hunter Pence was actually shagging flies in right field directly in front of me. Since he was out of ear shot, I asked a player who happened to be on the fence-line if he could ask the outfielder to sign my ball since my son's name was Hunter.

A few minutes later I saw the reliever talking to Pence and pointing our way. I had the ball but we had to borrow a pen, and when he hurriedly came over, I stammered some false sycophantic flattery about how Hunter was named after him and he said what a great a name and then grabbed Hunter for a second! I guess he sensed my panic because he quickly released the baby and smiled and asked if I wanted him to personalize the ball, which he gladly did. Then he had to go hit, so, like Superman he was off in a flash. How cool, I thought. He came over just to make an infant's day.

I remember when I was a kid going to a Giants game to "see" my then hero, a player named Jack Clark, hoping he would make my day special. But the difference was when I went to that game, I was wearing an eye-patch because some hack doctor thought it could fix my hereditary eye problem. As if having terrible eyes were not bad enough, they thought public humiliation would make it better. My dad took me to the game, in part to help me feel better. Instead, all game, I had to endure the screams and cheers of adoring fans screaming adulations for each successive play. It was like the players had transformed into dueling evangelists, every play a bigger miracle to top the previous. I see your blood to wine and raise you a walking on water!

Suffice to say, the agony of not being able to really see what was going on was worse than torture. I am sure I heard someone say, "THAT was the greatest play I have ever seen!" and that was it. I was pissed. I was like 7, but I was man-sized pissed. Eventually, in that game, Clark actually homered and I only really know this because I sneaked a peak through the patch just in time to see him high five someone at home plate amid astonishment about how far the ball had traveled.

Now here I was was with my own son, who has good eyes, watching a new hero being born. The man could have ignored us, or been upset that Hunter had on all his Giants gear, but instead he smiled, and gladly signed the ball, a childhood dream come true. And he made Hunter's day too.

I don't even care that Giants lost because someday I will tell Hunter the story of this ball, and how I was able to part the Red Sea to make it happen, as it will surely be told in my first novel, and we will always be able to look at the inscription and know for one day, out of 162, what a hero can do.