September 9, 2006 / Perspective / The Brooklyn Angle

Do-over!

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

The Brooklyn Papers / Rebekah Mindel

Kuntzman takes the outside fastball from 12-year-old Johnny Fernando for strike three.

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I realize that there is no cliche so tired, no complaint so insipid, no whine so tedious as the cry of the affluent, successful middle-aged white man.

Then I became middle-aged.

I won’t bore you with a lament about my calcium-leeching bones, my jelly-donut spinal discs, my elevated estrogen levels (no, seriously) and a varicose vein that looked like someone stuffed rigatoni in my leg.

Physical maladies aside, I’ve definitely started looking back — and not liking what I see. My youth was definitely wasted on this young:

When others were learning to play a musical instrument, pursuing a passion for the issues of the day or backpacking through Europe, I was memorizing “Star Trek” episodes (although I did once stand on the College Green with a sign reading, “U.S. Out of Grenada,” but only because I thought it would get me dates).

But rather than whine about all my mistakes, I’m calling for a do-over.

In an ongoing series of columns, I am going to re-experience key moments from my sub-par existence, and, with any luck, learn from my mistake.

For this week’s installment, I sought to vanquish one of my earliest demons: Little League baseball.

To say I was a poor Little League player is to do a disservice to poor players everywhere. I was abysmal. It’s no surprise, perhaps, given my thick glasses and body built for competitive eating. In a career that spanned three years, I had two hits (only one of which left the infield — and since I don’t remember where it fell, my eyes must have been closed when I swung).

Even today, that deep sense of failure pervades me. Maybe I can’t repair the damage, but perhaps I can, as they say in the self-help aisle, begin the healing process.

So I called up the 78th Precinct Council league and asked them to send over their best pitcher. They sent over Johnny Fernando, age 12.

As Fernando took his warm-ups, all I heard was the ball slamming into the catcher’s mitt sounding like a sledgehammer on cement blocks — bam! Bam! Bam! The kid was throwing all of 65 miles per hour, but to me, a Saturday softball player, he might as well have been Pedro Martinez.

I stepped to the plate and it all came back to me — “it” being the fear, the nausea, the intense desire to just swing at the first three pitches and walk back to the dugout as my long-suffering mother cheered, “You’ll get ’em next time, kiddo!”

But I dug in and took my hacks, fouling off a few pitches, popping one up to second base and missing eight out of every 10 fastballs from The Kid. My stroke, which even in softball resembles the slow swing of a gate that is off one hinge, was either extremely late or horrifically premature.

In one case, I believe I swung before the one of Fernando’s two-seam fastballs even left his hand.

Afterwards, just for fun, his 9-year-old brother, Joe, took the mound and proceeded to strike me out six times without so much as me tipping a ball backwards.

At this point in the story, it’s appropriate to use fancy bullet points to explain what I’ve learned:

• There are dead ballplayers in Green-Wood Cemetery with a better swing then me.

• There are not enough steroids in the world to allow me to compete with Johnny or Joey Fernando.

• This is going to be a LONG mid-life crisis.