by Craig Birk
Interlude Four
Mike (9)
It was a picture-perfect day at Scripps Ranch, twenty miles northeast of downtown San Diego. A slight wind carried the smell of the sea air, and random puffy white clouds floating overhead provided periodic respite from the warm sun. Much to the delight of the kids, as well as the parents, an occasional F-14 Tomcat from Miramar Marine Air Station buzzed over the field on its way back to base.
The weather was ideal, and so was the baseball diamond hosting the day’s Little League game between the Mets and the Royals. One of the fathers from the Cubs (one of the other teams in the league) had started a bio-tech firm that was bought out by Genentech. This particular dad had a fetish for baseball diamonds and dropped $475,000 into turning the Scripps Ranch Little League diamond into one of the finest places to play baseball on the West Coast. It was complete with sunken dugouts, a padded home run fence, bullpens, an electronic scoreboard, and seating for up to five hundred people. The field itself was brilliantly manicured. People joked that it was better than Jack Murphy Stadium where the Padres played. Somewhat unfortunately, the dad’s name was Schtupp, so the complex was officially renamed Schtupp Field. There were still plenty of errors made on Schtupp Field, but here, unlike most youth leagues around the country, bad hops were rarely the cause of any of them.
Mike Bochner showed up this particular day expecting to play third base and hit sixth in the lineup, as he usually did. Mr. Schtupp also funded an official league scorekeeper who printed out a stats sheet for the league, called Schtupp’s Stats. Years later, in college, Mike would joke with some of his childhood buddies about what their Schtupp stats were with the ladies, but at the time they took their baseball numbers very seriously. Some of the parents felt that displaying all of the kids’ statistics for everyone to see was inappropriate and unhealthy for those who had very low batting averages or high ERAs. Already showing signs of being the conservative Republican he would become years later, Mike found these parents to be “pussies” (a newly learned word he thoroughly enjoyed using) and felt they needed to deal with reality and quit being so politically correct. He astutely observed that most of the parents who objected happened to be the ones whose kids tended to suck. Mike was hitting a respectable .315 at the time.
Five minutes before the game, Walter Chen, one of the kids who had a very low batting average, was practicing his swing in left field. He neglected to look behind him and his follow-through hit Tyler Jones, the Mets’ best pitcher (arguably the best in the whole league), squarely in the jaw. Tyler dropped to the ground as blood sprayed out in every direction. Some of it went farther than just about anything else Walter hit that year. Though Tyler’s jaw would hurt every time he opened his mouth for the next six months, he was quite lucky because the bat hit just under his teeth, which remained intact. He was taken immediately to the hospital where it was determined that his jaw was not broken, which the doctor also said was very lucky.
With Tyler out for the day, this meant Willy Christensen would start the game on the mound for the Mets. Willy usually pitched the second half of the game, after Tyler, and was usually pretty good. This day, however, he just didn’t have it. The game started twenty-five minutes late due to the time it took to get Tyler off the field and on his way to the hospital. When the umpire finally said, “Play ball,” Mike watched Willy’s first pitch sail four feet above the catcher, batter and umpire. Pitch number two was equally as short as the first one was high. Number three drilled the leadoff batter in the wrist, at which point the child dropped the bat, grabbed his wrist and promptly started to cry.
“Jesus, what a pussy,” nine-year-old Mike thought to himself while smoothing out the dirt in front of third base.
Willy’s luck with the second batter wasn’t much better. He walked him on four pitches. He was more efficient with the third batter, hitting him in the head on the first pitch. The ball struck near the top of the batter’s helmet and bounced harmlessly up into the air toward the backstop. The child was unfazed and took off in a trot toward first base.
One of the parents from the other team was not happy about two of the first three batters being hit. “Hey, get this guy out of here. He’s terrible and he is going to hurt the kids,” he yelled.
Willy’s dad, who was a home-building contractor and could rarely attend games, happened to be at this one. Mr. Christensen was a former marine who stood about 6’4” and didn’t take shit from anyone. He didn’t intend to let anyone insult his kid on the field. “Stick a cork in it,” he instructed the other vocal parent.
Everyone assumed that would be the end of it, but it turned out Mr. Protective Parent was a cop and didn’t like being told what to do. He immediately stood and walked right up to Mr. Christensen and reiterated that if his son couldn’t throw strikes then he shouldn’t be in the game and was a danger. Other parents started slowly backing away as it seemed a physical confrontation was all but inevitable.
Sixteen-year-old Ryan Sackson, who was acting as home plate umpire for this game for the tidy sum of $18, had other ideas. For a high school kid, he took impressive control of the situation. Ryan walked immediately back to the backstop and, just as Willy’s dad was sticking his finger in the other parent’s face, he began to shout. “You two – you are both out of here. This is a little league game, for God’s sake. You should be embarrassed. Pack up your stuff and go home.”
The two adrenaline-fueled men looked at sixteen-year-old Ryan and realized his point was valid. They also realized he had given them a face-saving out that wouldn’t require fighting in front of their kids. Without saying a word, they turned away from each other and began gathering their stuff to leave. Pretty much everyone in the place had forgotten the kids on the field, but Willy was not happy about his dad getting thrown out of the first game he had come to see that year.
“Hey, fuck you, Blue, you can’t throw my dad out of the game,” he yelled at Ryan from the mound.
Willy got thrown out of the game as well. Four minutes later, he and his dad were walking out toward the car together. Mr. Christensen was proud of his son and gave him a pat on the back. “How about if we go to McDonalds and hang out for a while and not tell your mom about this?” he asked. “Sure, dad,” Willy agreed.
Fifteen minutes later, still with no outs on the board, the Mets coach put Mike on the hill to pitch. Mike had only thrown three innings the whole year, but he had a good arm and was as anxious as anyone to get this game moving. He struck out the first batter on three pitches, the second on four pitches and got the third to pop up to first base. The inning was over, and no runs had scored.
Because of all the commotion earlier in the day, when Mike breezed through the fourth inning, no one had quite realized yet that the Mets had a no-hitter going. By the sixth (the last inning in little league), however, with the Mets up 4-0, everyone was very aware of it. Mike got the leadoff hitter to ground out to third and then struck out the second hitter on a curveball that was just as sharp as it was in the first inning. The only thing standing between Mike and Scripps Ranch Little League history was Bobby DelFavro who entered the day hitting .421 according to Schtupp’s stats. Mike started him off with a fastball down in the zone that DefFavro took for a strike. The second pitch was a curveball that DefFavro hit well, but he was out in front of it and pulled it foul. Mike nervously took the sign, realizing he was just one pitch away.
He looked into the catcher for the sign and then scratched his balls and spit as he had seen the pros do. He delivered a fastball that was supposed to be outside, but it went right down the middle of the plate. DelFavro hit it well and drove it deep into right field. Mike’s heart sank as he saw Willy Chen turn his back to the field and start running toward the fence. Willy’s defense was equally as futile as his hitting. The ball began to descend near the warning track and Willy had still not turned his head back toward the infield. Mike was sure the ball was going to actually hit Willy in the head. But at the last minute his neck rotated about half way back
toward the infield and his gloved left hand stretched out from his body. Only a full two seconds after the ball settled into Willy’s glove did the crowd erupt into cheers and Mike started jumping up and down on the mound before running to hug the catcher.
Mike would go on to have a mediocre high school baseball career, but his all-time highlight was pitching a no-hitter on Schtupp Field that Saturday.
