Nobody plays baseball where I live now. Nobody. Everyone here plays soccer — the kids, the adults, even the dogs.
After all, we’re in Southern Italy, where soccer is a bigger deal than anything except pasta and the pope. In 2001, the Vatican even named a priest, Luigi Scrosoppi, the patron saint of soccer.
So, no big surprise. Where you’re from usually dictates the sports you play. In England, you might play cricket, whereas in Switzerland you probably ski. It all depends on your culture. You participate in the same sport as your family, friends and neighbors.
Here in Guardia Sanframondi, our ancient hillside town, soccer is the name of the game. Boys and girls of all ages compete on the soccer field next to the high school right around the corner from our house. Those kids also gather on an elevated concrete court in a park near the municipal building to kick a ball around.
Adults young and old might join the fun, too. It seems almost everyone in this laid-back hamlet, came from the cradle endowed with clever feet.
Now that’s all well and good, especially if you’re Italian. But I’m an American, and baseball is nowhere in evidence. Besides, soccer has always felt to me, well, foreign.
I mean, you mainly use your feet. You almost never get to deploy your hands. The ball is kicked but rarely thrown or caught, and never hit it with a bat. You might block a shot or pass with your chest, even bop it with your head. Have I got that straight?
Baseball was played all around me throughout my 69 years living in the United States. I not only played baseball but also watched it played in three dimensions and in real time. So yes, I grew up with baseball on the brain.
Soon after I moved to Italy, I lucked out and chanced to play a little baseball. Some brothers and sisters in the family living across the road from our house would play soccer together. One morning, I invited our neighbors over to sample baseball with an American expat. They’d never played baseball before. So I demonstrated. Kids being kids, they were quick to give it a go, taking turns at bat, and happily so.
Baseball will always be the quintessentially American game. Back as far as 1888, poet Walt Whitman called baseball “our game, the American game.” More recently, the Columbia historian Jacques Barzun famously declared, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”
And so never do I feel quite so American in my bones as in those moments when I’m thinking or talking or watching or playing baseball.
The other day, I followed a trail deep into the woods high up a hill. I came across a pick-up truck, obviously long abandoned, and nearby, strewn in the grass, some fallen green apples now turning brown. I picked up one of the apples, and — lo! — a wave of familiarity washed over me.
For so many years, even if decades ago, I’d held baseballs in my hand. The apple was almost exactly the size and weight of a baseball — it had the same heft to it. And immediately I knew what I had to do.
I took aim at the windshield of the forlorn forsaken pick-up truck and went into my windup. I flung the apple with all my might as if at a strike zone where a batter awaited. For the next 15 minutes, there in that orchard, I pitched away. I made like Whitey Ford or Nolan Ryan, once again 12-years-old, once again playing stickball with my buddies against the brick wall of my hometown elementary school. In those few moments, as well I might, I felt back home.
So now I have a new plan. I’m going to be an ambassador for baseball stationed here in Italy. For starters, I’ll to buy some bats and balls, and I’ll venture over to the park in the heart of town with our two children and two grandchildren.
And right then and there we’ll start to throw and hit and catch. And all the other kids in the park that day will see us and mosey over hoping to get in on the action, too. And soon we’ll all be playing baseball together.
Brody, a consultant and essayist, is author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
