Point of View: The Spirit Grows

I read about “terminal lucidity” the other day, and breathed a sigh of relief inasmuch as I’m still wondering what it’s all about.

“At the end of life, it seems,” I said to Mary, “people who’ve been in comas and the like come to and ask how their grandchildren’s Little League season has been going.”

Actually, I don’t have to ask how the Little League season has been going: It went very well, thank you. It was Tyler Hansen, a 9-year-old, who caught my eye as I arrived one evening for the games at Pantigo. Strike, strike, strike. He was throwing nothing but strikes, and with zip too. I turned to a woman at my side — his mother, I was to learn — and said, “Wow, this kid is impressive!”

I don’t want to give him a swelled head, but his grit and his mechanics were so evident that it’s stuck in my mind, and I’ve seen many Little League games in my time, including those played by the 1991 team that won the district and county championships, the team that Brendan Fennell seemed always to bail out with grand-slam home runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and with East Hampton trailing by three.

That may not be utterly lucid, but it’s the way I remember it. Just as I remember Andy Tuthill repeatedly hitting a 4-year-old’s equivalent to a 500-foot (well, make that a 400-foot) homer with his father and me looking on, and Ross Gload’s three home runs into St. Joseph’s College’s parking lot, each farther than the last, in the small school county championship game of 1994.

Funny what you remember. Roberto Clemente’s rifled throws from right field that caught by surprise runners who’d made a wide turn in rounding first base is another. And how sad Muffin and I were when we heard he had died.

So perhaps baseball in East Hampton will come around again. If it does, we’ll have people like Vinny Alversa, Henry Meyer, Tim Garneau, and Kevin Brophy to thank for it, not to mention the players themselves.

It really is a matter of the spirit — not just mind and body — as I suppose is the case with all exceptional teams.

The spirit grows and flourishes and moves on.