Making A Win Possible for All

Whitman yearned to shout from the roof. His barbaric yawp. Me too. For right now I am sitting on the grass, my back resting against a fence, wanting to yawp from atop the Gateway Arch. Everyone, Listen. I know you’re all excited about the Cardinals-Cubs series starting at Busch in a few hours, but run over to Tilles Park and see Bryan because he’s up at bat. Right now.

Cheer for Bryan and his blue walker. Bryan and his smile. Bryan and his volunteer buddy, a teenage boy, who cradles Bryan from behind...so that Bryan can swing the bat.

“Come on, pitcher, throw something good,” cries a voice from the sidelines, a mother perhaps.

There is more playful mockery.

“You gotta swing,” says the pitcher, who has started tossing two balls at a time. Bryan, in his gray jersey with red embroidered Falcons, misses them both.

“I think that counts as two strikes,” the pitcher laughs, for he knows that strikeouts don’t exist in Challenger Baseball. No outs. Everyone bats. Everyone fields. Buddies help their partners bat and run bases, protect them in the field, hand them balls to throw. 

The pitcher will toss pitch after pitch after pitch, grab different sized balls and stand varying distances from the plate until each batter connects.

He tosses two again, and this time Bryan smacks one of them toward second base. He and his buddy head toward first. 

The next Falcon says he can’t hit. The pitcher tells him, yes, you can. He does. And Bryan and his buddy head to second.

A kid with a Lafayette Lacrosse T-shirt catches the next hit and hands it to the boy next to him, a boy with a red wheelchair covered in Harry Potter banners. He throws it to the pitcher.

Soon, Bryan will slide to home plate, laughing, always laughing—maybe because he’s breaking the Challenger Baseball no-sliding rule, or maybe just because sliding is sliding, and who wants to return to their living room with a still-clean uniform?

Bryan has cerebral palsy; his aunt is my dear friend. The others? Some use wheelchairs, others have Down Syndrome. Six-foot tall Dalton runs off the field. Every game. Today he never even batted. Three buddies chased him, held the back of his jersey, kept him safe. I could not even guess his disability. 

After the game, I will see he and his mom in their white pick-up truck, and I will wonder about their life. My son Max will too. He will long for assurance that this kid’s disability isn’t as bad as it seems. But I don’t know.  To me it seems bad, real bad.

When Max was two, he would stand around in his diaper and name every Cardinals player, their jersey number, and their position. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured him in its Our Own Oddities column; the yellowed clip still hangs on our refrigerator. 

Max remembers the sequence of most Cardinals games. And at age four, he started to play T-ball. Then coach pitch, then machine pitch and now he’s a first baseman.

So I guess sometimes, if you love baseball enough, you want to make sure that other kids, even those with some disability you’ll never know the name of, get to hit and bat and laugh and not be stuck outside this world.

And so even if your mom says, “Hey, Max, it’s 90 degrees, and it’s okay if you don’t want to do Challenger today,” you know that actually, no, Mom, it’s not okay. They need you. 

And you want to be there when Joseph rounds second and literally steals the base because it gets stuck in the wheel of his new power wheelchair. You want to be there when Tyler gets those big hits, and you run with him to first, holding out your hand for a high five.

You want to be there when Bryan pushes aside his walker and, yet again, breaks that no-sliding rule, laughing from the ground.

Yes, I want to scream from the rooftop. Come fill the stands. There won’t be a twelfth inning, game-winning shot by Pujols, but the mighty Falcons are facing the Cougars today.    

And guess what? Everyone will win.

Baker is a middle school language arts teacher in Missouri.