Coach Bamsey

The baseball diamond at Menlo Park is gone, but when it existed, I held the record for most batters hit by pitch in a single inning.

Technically, what I did is an unofficial record. Menlo Park was never the Major Leagues. But I find it impossible to believe any pitcher in the history of that small, hard-packed baseball diamond in the heart of Sioux Falls beaned more batters than I did in one inning on a summer day circa 1970.

No doubt I would have hit more, but in an act of human kindness for which I am grateful even now, the umpire walked up to me, held out his hand and asked for the ball. Frankly, he had no choice. The parents of the players on the opposing team were clamoring for his soul and mine.

Millions of Americans welcomed baseball on its return this week. Like me, they missed it. They missed the way shortstops leap to avoid sliding base runners to turn a 4-6-3 double play. They missed the way hitters scrape away the chalk at the back of the batter's box in search of an edge. They missed the sound the ball makes when the third baseman throws it and the way catchers spring to their feet, yank off their masks, tilt their heads and peer into the heavens in pursuit of a spiraling pop up behind home plate.

I like most sports. But it is only baseball I love. This is true of Lyle Bamsey as well.

Raised on a farm five miles outside of Howard, Bamsey started playing baseball almost the instant he could shoulder a bat. The game suited him. Whatever it asked him to do – hit, run, throw – Bamsey could do. His father Wayne and mother Marge cherished the game, too, and often on Sundays they would take their children to Canova in the afternoon and then Howard at night to watch each town's team play.

In 1969 at the age of 27, Bamsey and two of his co-workers at John Morrell – Bill Brieher and Gary Jones – were asked by the Jaycees to coach a little league baseball team in Sioux Falls. They said yes, and for the next nine years of his life, Bamsey spent his summers teaching 9- and 10-year-olds not only how to play baseball but what it meant to be a baseball player. He taught them the importance of practicing and the importance of playing hard and the importance of winning. But most of all he taught them to honor the game, and he told them the best way they could do that was to have fun.

Today, the 65-year-old Bamsey sells apparel, pens, coffee mugs and a litany of other items for an advertising specialty company in Sioux Falls. Like cords of wood, memories of baseball lie stacked in his mind. If prompted, Bamsey retrieves them as if they were records in a jukebox.

One of his favorite memories – and one that, if it were possible to ever finger the genesis of an idea, might be the spark that lit his desire to be a coach – occurred in 1952 when he was around 10 years old. He and his mother had just returned home from Madison where Bamsey for the first time in his life had played a baseball game in a town other than Howard. In that game he had hit a home run. "I remember Dad being in the yard and me being all excited," recalls Bamsey. "I can still see me going home and telling him about it."

No sport in America is steeped in memory more than baseball. Someday centuries and ages hence, it will no longer be so. Other sports will have histories as great. But until that day comes, baseball is our conduit, our connection to the past, and perhaps that – as much as anything – is why it means so much to so many. "There is," says Bamsey, "just something special about it."

By the time I turned 18, I had an average arm at best. But when I was 8, thanks to the benefits of an active pituitary gland, I threw reasonably hard. Once the baseball left my hand, however, it was anybody's guess where it might land.

On that day at Menlo Park, the ball had the unfortunate habit of burrowing into spinal cords or bouncing off hard-plastic helmets. It's one thing to get hit in the foot or grazed on the arm or the leg. To get plunked in the head is a far different matter. And in some ways being beaned square in the back is worse. The pain is paralyzing. Nor is there a sound like it. Whoever coined the word THUD must have been at a baseball park on a day two wild pitchers were on the mound.

Hitting a batter elicits an odd set of emotions. Part of you is angry because you just put someone on base, and the point of the game is to keep people off. Part of you is embarrassed because pitchers are supposed to throw the ball by the batter – not at him. Part of you is contrite because the person who had been standing in the batter's box a second ago, his face full of anticipation and angst, now is coiled in the dirt, writhing in agony. Finally, part of you is apprehensive because if you hit one batter, who's to say you won't hit more?

I was mortified that day at Menlo Park. I was so humiliated that I could not even look in the direction of the other team. If I had, I am quite certain I would have seen them drawing lots or fingering rosaries.

Mercifully, my control as a pitcher improved considerably the following year when I turned 9. I still hit an occasional batter or two. But I forever ceased being a threat to public safety.

For that – and more – I owe Lyle Bamsey.

I never had a finer coach or met a better man.