First day of tryouts

 March 24 or maybe March 31

After a week’s worth of rain, which knocked out what was to be the first day of tryouts, it looked like we were finally going to conduct our first tryout on March 24. But then a seagull flew into a power line.

            The prison went dark, that early March night. And it was a dark and stormy winter’s night already. No lights at a prison! Worst case scenario indeed. Just after I had contacted all the coaches, the call came in from Don about how a huge generator was going to be installed at the prison, on the 24th, and all programs were to be cancelled. Right away, worry-wart me, began to fear that opening day would arrive and we would not be ready.

            March 31 did roll around. Saturday morning on the lower yard then with a full contingent of coaches, including two I wish were no longer with the baseball program, and a bunch of eager, excited convicts, all of whom wanted to impress the coaches with how good they were at baseball.

            I figured there would be a move made, by a couple of coaches, to sabotage the draft process and for some weeks I pulled as many strings as I could to prevent that from happening. It should never have come to this, but it did, and now the only thing to do is go on. For the first time, in a serious way, I wanted to walk away from it all. Now at age seventy I find it difficult to fight the battles, but this one I was going to deal with. I knew another threat, or an incident of almost any kind, could end the baseball program. One powerful person at the prison told me he was looking for any excuse to shut us down.

            My good friend Don DeNevi, the state employee who has overseen the baseball program for the past twelve years, and I have done what we could to ensure that Plan B would move forward even though there would be two teams and instead of four. We talk on the phone often and do what is within our power to have a recreational program that works for the inmates. Without Don being of the same mind as I am, I would have walked away long ago. But consistently, we have supported each other.

            Don cannot take the same stand as I do against those who would bend the baseball program to suit their own agenda. By ” those” I mean the several inmates that started the trouble as players for the A’s last year and those two A’s coaches who became their ducks.

Don and I agree that the inmates are acting out of the fear that they will be left out, not drafted, since there are the new guys on the Block, and much younger, and apparently quite talented as athletes. Now, we can empathize with that, but we are not giving in to it either. The program demands an equal and fair chance for a convict to make one of the teams and the draft is our solution. And that is the whole deal–a process of selecting players based on their baseball skills and not on a good old boys’ agreement.