Before this week, the last time I saw a wooden bat in youth baseball may have been at my brother's game in 1988. Nice yellow pants, guys. Photo: Mitch Teich
May 22, 2021 —
I was sitting, minding my own business, at my son’s baseball game this past week when I was startled by a sound I hadn’t heard at a youth baseball game in years. It wasn’t 1980s and ‘90s dugout chatter – I yell “can of corn” and “ducks on the pond” from the cheap seats every week, much to the bemusement of my wife.
No, the sound I heard was a resonating “thock!” from the direction of home plate. And then I saw it. A wooden bat. A piece of lumber in more than a baseball metaphor way. Up by 17 runs, one of my son’s teammates pulled out the wooden bat his brother made and hit with it.
As a baseball dad and someone who played a long time ago, I have mixed feelings about the aluminum bats kids use in 2021. They make it possible for kids of smaller stature to hit a ground ball through the infield more easily. And I won’t miss replacing cracked and shattered bats, at least until my son gets his first signing bonus from the Red Sox.
But the sound of wooden bats hitting baseballs is part of the soundtrack of life that younger generations aren’t familiar with. There’s a lot about 21st Century life that is good, maybe even better than it once was. At the same time, this is the era of leaf blowers and laser printers and French press coffee makers, none of which provide what you would think of as a satisfying noise. (I would stipulate the noise of a leaf blower is the exact opposite of “satisfying.”)
While the results of leaf blowing and the laser printer and the French press might be better than their forebears, there is something far more gratifying about the noise a rake makes on crispy leaves, or the clack and ding of a typewriter, or even the zizzing of a dot-matrix printer. The best noise a laser printer offers is the sound of a person swearing while they try to replace the toner cartridge. And while the coffee is terrible, the gurgle-blurble of a coffee percolator echoing in a basement social hall is delightful.
There are other noises that have all but disappeared, as well. As of two years ago, our mechanic in Wisconsin still offered full-service gas, and so that was the last time I heard the attention-clang tripped by hoses outside garage bays for decades. When was the last time you heard the sound of a handheld credit card machine, making an imprint onto a carbon paper receipt? Or, for that matter, the sound caused by tearing off a perforated carbon paper receipt?
I’m sure there are other sounds I miss - or you miss - from our shared past. But you’ll have to share them with me, because right now, it’s hard for me to think with the sound of the leaf blower down the street.
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May 23, 2021 at 01:17AM
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