For some reason I can't remember, the phrase: "Béisbol has been very, very good to me," (intoned in a heavy Puerto Rican accent), has been a favorite of mine for years. And while I can't remember its specific genesis, the phrase is always uttered after a particularly lucky turn in my life, of which there have been many (although there have been plenty of the unlucky ones, too).
Maybe the phrase has been around this long because my dream as a little girl was to become a Major League baseball player. While my mom's dream was to become a ballerina, and I can vaguely recall my own pudgy self decked out in a pink leotard and tutu, trying unsuccessfully and rather grudgingly to look graceful as I attempted a demi plié, I really wanted to be like Johnny Bench or Tany Pérez or Joe Morgan. It's not that I wanted to be a man to play baseball. I wanted to be the girl-me and play baseball. However, standing at barely five feet tall, I was not fated for either the MLB or ballerina-type fame and fortune.
However, for my Tío José Enrique, who managed a Little League team, I was the perfect size to be his team's madrina, or godmother. Thus, he'd drag me to his games on weekends. I was dressed up to the nines in a white dress with lace-trimmed white socks, white patent leather shoes, and a white headband that my Titi Bebi said made me look "angelic." Once in the stadium, I'd stand there, squinting my eyes against the glare, baking in the sun as the Puerto Rico and U.S. anthems were played (not in that order), with the dust blowing everywhere as I cursed my girlie-ness, wanting instead to play like the boys and get a chance to hit the ball out of the park.
Some years later, I remember visiting some second cousins at their finca in Coamo and going to the yard to play the national (as in Puerto Rico) sport. I got the chance to pitch and I threw one ball so hard it got stuck in the cyclone fence that bounded their property. My cousin refused to let me pitch again after that, fearing, I'm sure, that the ball thrown that hard might hit one of us before the bat got to it. That was the end of my pitching career.
I finally did get my chance to play, though. In high school, my best friend Kathy was the team's catcher and I was the substitute who got to wear the cool-looking catcher's mask, rodilleras and mitt when she couldn't. I once even got to tag someone out at home plate, which was quite the thrill. While I hate fielding (after a ball made contact with my forehead when I was trying out for right fielder), I've always liked to bat. And I'm not half bad at it, either, although I've always had a minor problem. When I played in a law firm's co-ed softball league in Washington, D.C., many years later, I routinely got thrown out of the games by angry umpires for hurling the bat after I scored a hit. That's despite the many"clinics" I got from my sports-ologist brother, who did his very best to show me how to bat without killing someone in the process.
In the more sedate and even less physically nimble years of adulthood, the passion for playing baseball has been downgraded to watching the occasional game on television, especially when the oft-cursed Red Sox (I was born in Boston) or the impressive Puerto Rico teams play. Last year's emotion-packed Clásico Mundial de Béisbol made my baseball-loving heart pound again. When the nail-biting final game between Cuba and Puerto Rico wasn't broadcast on any cable station here in Ohio, my husband found it being broadcast in Cuba through his short-wave radio. I felt like I was back in the past when the radio was the way most baseball games were experienced. Listening to the roar of the crowd and the frenzy of the announcers was just as emocionante as watching would've been and just as heartbreaking when Cuba trounced Puerto Rico to take the pennant.
My husband says he doesn't understand why I watch baseball, since it almost always breaks my heart. Yesterday I signed up for what we called the "Spik Pack," a group of Latino channels offered by my cable company, just because it includes a sports channel that will actually broadcast the Serie del Caribe on the same night as the Super Bowl (talk about Latino buying power!). That's because last night, I planned to be among the millions of Latinos glued to my television not to watch football but to watch Puerto Rico play (and hopefully beat) the Dominican Republic. In Puerto Rico, my mom and dad did the same, as did my brother and his family in Mississippi. We had plans to call each other and rant and rave about something or another (just like my sister and I do when we keep track of how Miss Puerto Rico does in the Miss Universe Pageant). Alas, it was not to be.
La República started off with four runs on our best pitcher in the first inning and it was all an avalanche from there. I almost didn't mind that my newly purchased cable channel didn't work (and the company couldn't explain why) so that instead of baseball I had an Impressionist canvas being created on my TV screen by the little moving squares of color. That was soon followed by a totally blank screen. By the time cable came back late at night and I checked the game, the Dominicans were ahead 9-0 in the seventh and I found out this morning that they barrieron el piso with us, winning 12-0. I think it's poetic justice. Many Puerto Ricans are horridly racist toward Dominicans, using them as the butt of their ethnic jokes so they can feel superior to someone (weird when you consider that Puerto Ricans have been the butt of racist Anglo jokes for more than a century). Thus, the universe is slightly more balanced this morning after the Dominicans kicked our collective Puerto Rican ass.
Heartbreak or not, baseball will always be a part of me. I must say that the one clothing accessory I own that elicits the most comments by total strangers, especially men, is not my pair of gorgeous suede pink high-heel knee-high boots but my Boston Red Sox cap. Feeling some kind of odd kinship, men address me anywhere: the supermarket, the gas station, the post office, wherever I happen to be wearing my navy blue cap with the blazing red "B" (which a Guatemalan friend once reminded me also stands for Boricua). The truth is, though, that my affinity with the Red Sox is more platonic than committed so I don't really keep up at all with the team's never-ending tragedy.
That became painfully evident last year when a guy started up a conversation with me about the Red Sox's miseries, specifically the fact that our players tend to dump us and go play for our arch-enemies, the New York Yankees. I smiled reassuringly and said in an upbeat tone: "Well, at least we still have Johnny Damon." He couldn't believe his ears. "What are you talking about?! Johnny is nothing but a Judas, he went to the Yankees, too!" That's the last time I tried to make small talk about the Red Sox.
Well, I never did become a Major League baseball player, and I never will hit a ball out of a brightly illuminated ballpark before a standing-room-only crowd. But I can't complain. In the end, béisbol has been very, very good to me.
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Chico Escuela, played by Garrett Morris, was the Weekend Update sports correspondent. A retired Hispanic ballplayer with limited command of the English language, he wrote the tell-all book Bad Stuff About the Mets (sample: "Tom Seaver - he once borrow Chico's soap and no give it back"). In spring training 1979, Chico's unsuccessful comeback attempt was documented on several Update segments. The character was first introduced in a St. Mickey's Knights of Columbus sketch, but subsequently Escuela appeared solely on Update.
Typically he would be introduced by Jane Curtin, thus compelling him to say, "Thank you, Hane." Soon would follow his standard catchphrase: "Baseball been berry, berry good to me!" Sammy Sosa, at the peak of his stardom in the late 1990s, would sometimes repeat that line as a joke, to the media, albeit in his true-to-life strong Hispanic accent.
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