More than an old baseball bat

I’ll admit to being a product of my generation, and maybe that’s why I’ve never understood the attraction to aluminum and, now, composite baseball bats.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s baseball was still, for the most part, a wooden bat sport. Yes, aluminum bats were first gaining in popularity when I was in high school, but by that time my youth league baseball career was over and I wasn’t good enough to make the high school team.

If it’s possible to be addicted to smells, I had an addiction to the smell of the horsehide of a baseball, the fresh leather of a new baseball glove, the natural wood smell of a bat and, of course, the fresh cut grass on a spring baseball diamond.

Boys of my generation didn’t worry about what components went into a bat. All we needed was a solid wood club. If the bat was a Mickey Mantle or Hank Aaron model that was even better.

We bought our bats expecting them to break one day. And we took every precaution to hold the bat so the label was facing away from the pitcher when we made contact with the ball.

If we were lucky, a bat lasted two or three seasons before we outgrew it. If we were extremely lucky, that bat became a prized possession for life.

I am one of the lucky ones that still have an old wooden bat from my youth.

When I was 9-years old my favorite player was Roger Maris. By that time Maris was a half dozen seasons removed from his famed 61 home runs for the Yankees in 1961 and was finishing up his career with the St. Louis Cardinals, who just happened to be my team at the time.

Maris playing for the Cardinals was just one of the connections I felt with him. Like Maris, I played right field, batted left-handed and threw right-handed. I felt it was a sign that he should be, at least for that time, my baseball hero.

So during the summer of my ninth year when it came time to get a new baseball bat I naturally wanted a Roger Maris model. I found my prized bat at a K-Mart in Pensacola.

It didn’t matter to me that at 34 inches in length and 34 ounces in weight the bat was too big for an undersized kid because Maris was my guy.

Looking back, the bat was too big for me and should have been outlawed in my league, but I was occasionally allowed to take the big stick to the plate.

Although I have always love the game of baseball, I wasn’t a very good player and I know now that Roger Maris couldn’t have swung a 34-ounce bat either when he was 9.

I am convinced that swinging that heavy bat helped me develop muscle mass in my forearms and shoulders.

Without knowing it then, buying that bat was one of my first small steps on my path to manhood.

My baseball days are over now, and yet I still find myself picking up that old bat that I now swing with ease. My other childhood toys were broken or discarded long ago.

That old Roger Maris model baseball bat is a connection to my past and a reminder of the hope that springs eternal when we are young.