The Gulf Coast Sugar (we're half Houstonians and half Galvestonians) is a pretty competitive sandlot baseball team. In fact, some of our sandlot frenemies think we care too much about winning. But even the Sugar usually aren't standing up in the dugout, fingers laced in the chain link fence, cheering on our teammate in the batter's box in the top of the 2nd inning. Except in this game, because we're watching our 68-year-old first baseman try to swing a monster of a (wooden) bat that measures 36 inches and weighed 42 ounces.
Boysh was my third-grade teacher in Houston before he became my stepfather. Before that, he was a baseball-playing hippie from Boston. He used to dominate me and my brother and our friends in wiffle ball with an absolutely wicked arsenal. He loved to tell us how he averaged over two strikeouts per inning as a high school pitcher back in Newton, and how he would've been a college if not big league pitcher had he not blown out his shoulder his senior year in high school.
I grew up hearing about Yaz and Luis Tiant and other Red Sox stars, but Boysh's obsession was the one that got away from the Sox - Babe Ruth.
After I joined the Sugar about a dozen years ago, he just couldn't stand not being included, and so one game when we were short a player or two, he got the nod, and he (and his cigar) have been a fixture at first base ever since. He's a solid first baseman with limited range, a dugout cut-up and over-sharer on the group text thread, and despite recently turning 68, he probably has a top-three average exit velo on the team, and we have some guys who actually played baseball on the team (not me).
Well, Boysh retired from his job running a middle school a couple of years ago, and so he had time to really get into some of his obsessions. Including The Babe. He decided that he wanted to get a Babe bat and see if he could swing it. But he couldn't find one online. So he picked up the phone and called Hillerich and Bradsby, the longtime owner of the Louisville Slugger bat company, and he told the woman who answered the phone that he was a big Babe Ruth fan and wanted to buy a Babe Ruth model bat. She told him that Babe's contract with H&B was still in effect, and approval by the Bambino's estate would be required.
Most people, when told, "Well, you'd need the approval of the dead guy's estate..." would move on. Boysh isn't most people.
He tracked down the name of Babe's granddaughter online, who is now living in Connecticut and advocating for MLB to retire Babe's #3 jersey across the league, like they've done with Jackie Robinson's 42. Then he somehow managed to find a mailing address for her. And then he sat down and wrote a heartfelt letter to Linda Ruth Tosetti about himself and his love for her grandfather, his support for the jersey retirement, and his sandlot baseball team; included his email address, and sent it off.
"I ALMOST DROVE OFF THE ROAD!" Boysh was practically hyperventilating when he called me ten days later to say that he had heard back from the Babe's granddaughter, who had granted him permission to have a Babe model bat. He'd been driving when he saw the email alert, and he had pulled over to read it and then immediately called H&B, and the woman who answered was the same one he had talked to a couple of weeks earlier. "I was just talking to Miss Ruth earlier, and she, and we, are just tickled about this!" she said. "I'm going to transfer you now to the department that takes the bat order for professional players and they'll get you all set up."
Even I was getting caught up in the romance of it all - Boysh went on to tell me that they tracked down the period-correct version of the Louisville Slugger / H&B logo for the bat, and that they were going to "fire up the old machine" that burned the logo into the bat, which apparently isn't how they label bats anymore. Two weeks and only $120 later, and the box showed up at Boysh's door.
"You're not actually going to swing that thing in the game, are you?" Fellow baseball junkie and former collegiate player Mark asked Boysh before our next game. Of course the whole team had gotten the story on the team text thread, but now everybody was taking turns examining, holding and swinging the club as we loosened up. "Damn right I am!" answered Boysh.
So there we are, crowded up at the dugout fence, hooting and hollering as Boysh takes the first pitch a little up. He doesn't wait any longer to see what he and the Babe's bat could do, taking a mighty rip and absolutely drilling a ball into left-center field for a hustling single that would have been a standup double for any other player on the team.
I jog over to first base to pinch run for him (pinch running allowed anytime in sandlot for catchers; Boysh; and anyone else who wants to avoid injury). "I bet that feels good, doesn't it?"
"It sure does, Jeremy. It sure does."
