Found this out recently. I hold the Canadian high school baseball records for assists by an outfielder in a season, with three (3), and in a career, with four (4). That’s in twenty-two (22) career games.
In 1995, when I was in grade nine, I was playing right field for Burlington Central High School against Aldershot High School, and I threw out a guy who was trying to stretch a single into a double on a relatively-short drive in the gap. I got to it and fired a strike to second for the out.
Also in that game, that same guy, who was a city rep player on the same team as my brother who was four years older, was pitching for Aldershot. He was throwing seriously fast by my fifteen-year-old standards, close to 90 miles per hour. I took a cut at a fastball, and despite being very late, I managed to get a bat on it while it was practically over the plate. I lined a soft single to the opposite field, over the first base bag, just inside the foul line. Couldn’t believe it. Hit a single off the guy. Technically, it counts.
In my last year of ball, grade twelve, I threw out three (3) runners from right field in six (6) games. I remember feeling like it was happening a lot. I remember the last one in particular because the thrown wasn’t even to a base per se. There was a runner rounding second, no one was covering third, but our second baseman, who had been the cutoff man, was near the pitcher’s mound running towards third. I remember making eye contact with him and then firing a throw towards the base, a reasonably low throw that he was able to grab right in front of the runner, and he tagged the guy out about three-quarters of the way to third.
I quit baseball at the end of grade twelve because I was done playing rep ball, my arm hurt, and I knew that I wasn’t going anywhere with baseball. Scouts had seen me, and what I’d heard was true—they look for guys with raw, physical skills, because it’s easier to teach a guy with the physical gifts how to pitch than it is to invest in a guy like me who’s 5’6″ and tops out at 84. The guy on our team who threw 89 was the one who got drafted.
My future was Lakeshore Men’s League, maybe the Brants, Burlington’s Inter-County baseball team. I wasn’t disappointed. If you’re not the best player in your league, you’re not moving on. You could play college ball in the States, but I wasn’t interested in that. No one from our league was going on to the majors. Joey Votto played for East York three years behind us; he goes to the majors, not us. That’s more or less it. I believe Rob Ducey played Ontario rep before that.
I remember one instance where a teammate, referring to another teammate, said, with amusement at the guy’s over-estimation of his relative skills, which, to be fair, were pretty good: “(The guy) thinks he’s going to be in The Show.” I was realistic. I really, really knew that wasn’t going to happen. I hadn’t been in what I would call good physical shape since I was in grade two. In my twenties, I got a personal trainer and found out what’s it’s like to actually be in shape. It really does explain a lot. I could go on about my limitations as a ballplayer.
By that time, I had been playing the drums for ten years, guitar for three, and piano for one. That summer, 1998, my brother had a Windows PC that was fast enough and had enough RAM that you could record multi-track digital audio. I made a crude album’s worth of recordings of a batch of early songs; my first recorded home-brew musical works. There was a future if I invested my time in music, but none if I invested in baseball.
It’s a reap-what-you-sow kind of world. A few years later, I made a similar decision about computer games, after I spent six months playing the best game of Sid Meier’s Civilization III I’d ever played. It occurred to me that the best I could do was to spend months trying to play another game that was as good as that one. There was no future in it. I could spend that time playing the piano and guitar. And I did. I also read things.
Anyway, I just thought it was neat that I was throwing out so many base runners. Very nice to learn that I actually hold two records.
