There are some things we own, and there are some things that become part of who we are.
For me, one of those things is an old Wilson baseball glove.
It is a George Brett Signature Model A2124, although when I was about 12 years old, the model number meant absolutely nothing to me. What mattered was that it was a baseball glove, it had George Brett's name in the palm and, most importantly, Dad and I picked it out together.
Buying a baseball glove in the early 1980s was different than it is today. There weren't seemingly a million different sizes, web designs and models for every possible position and age group. At least, that isn't how I remember it. You went to the store, tried on some gloves and found one that felt right.
Dad helped me pick this one.
Then he helped me make it mine.
Anyone who grew up playing baseball in those days probably remembers the ritual of breaking in a new glove. A new glove wasn't ready when you brought it home. It had to be worked and shaped. You put a baseball in the pocket. You closed the glove around it. You worked the leather with your hands.
Eventually, it stopped being a baseball glove and became your baseball glove.
Dad helped me through all of that. He helped me shape it. He helped me use it. More importantly, he helped me learn with it.
Over the next several summers, that glove was simply my glove.
It went with me through my teenage baseball years, through games and practices and all those hours of playing catch that nobody kept statistics for. Eventually high school came along and my baseball playing days ended.
Playing baseball ended, anyway.
Baseball never really left.
I married in 1995, and for a summer or two we played co-ed softball. The old Wilson came along for some of that, too. It was a baseball glove being asked to catch a softball, but that didn't really matter.
It was still my glove.
Eventually I bought a softball glove. I still have that glove, too. By today's standards, it is probably closer to an outfielder's baseball glove. It's bigger, with considerably more reach than that old Wilson. My George Brett glove, meanwhile, is closer to what we'd now consider an infielder's or pitcher's glove.
The softball glove is perfectly good.
But it isn't MY glove.
There is a difference.
While I wasn't playing baseball anymore, the game found other ways to keep me close.
In 2011, I was asked to announce games for the Hastings Hawks. That same year I joined the Hawks board, and since 2014, I have served as the organization's president.
That has given me a seat for a lot of baseball.
Actually, "a lot" doesn't really cover it.
Between the Hawks and all the other baseball played at Veterans Park, I have seen well over a thousand games up close and personal. I've watched pitchers work hitters, defenses shift, runners take leads and coaches make decisions. I've watched good baseball, bad baseball, championship baseball and baseball where everyone involved was probably happy when the final out was recorded.
I coached my son for several years, too, which gave baseball another meaning entirely. Somewhere along the way, I went from being the kid learning the game from Dad to being the dad trying to teach it to my own son.
I know baseball.
Or at least I thought I did.
It turns out there is a considerable difference between knowing baseball and actually playing baseball.
I can sit behind a microphone and see where a throw should go. I can watch a ground ball and know how it should be fielded. I can recognize a breaking ball from a pretty comfortable distance.
None of those things mean my 52-year-old body can actually do anything about them.
That question became considerably less theoretical a few weeks ago when an opportunity came up to play on a 50-plus baseball team.
Not softball.
Baseball.
Before I could say yes, there was something I needed to know.
Could I still do it?
I wasn't expecting to discover some previously hidden reserve of athletic greatness. I just wanted to know whether putting me on an actual baseball field would be a reasonable idea or an elaborate practical joke on everyone else involved.
Thankfully, retired Hawks board member and friend Tony Kaiser was willing to help me find out.
We practiced.
It didn't take long to establish two things.
First, I need to practice more.
A lot more.
Second, I can still do some things on a baseball field.
The machinery was rusty, but apparently it wasn't completely seized.
That was enough.
So, when the opportunity came to play a 50-plus game in Loretto, about an hour from home, I said yes.
There were still plenty of perfectly rational reasons to say no. I hadn't faced live pitching in decades. I'm 52. My brain occasionally remembers being an athlete, but various other parts of my body have filed formal objections to that description.
There was another reason I said yes, though.
Dad died Sept. 10, 2024.
There are phrases people use so often that you stop thinking about them while they're alive. Then they're gone, and somehow those same words can stop you in your tracks.
Dad had one of those.
If I asked him whether he wanted to go somewhere or do something, particularly as he got older, I heard the same response countless times.
"I ain't dead yet."
That was Dad's way of saying yes.
It wasn't morbid. Quite the opposite. It meant, let's go. Let's have some fun. Let's do something. We're here today and there is no guarantee about tomorrow, so why would we sit around waiting for life to happen?
I ain't dead yet.
So, I went to Loretto.
I brought both gloves.
I started warming up with the softball glove. Logically, it made sense. I hadn't played baseball in decades, and a bigger glove offered a little more margin for error.
Almost immediately, something wasn't right.
It wasn't necessarily the glove. It was me.
I was an hour from home, standing on a baseball field at 52 years old, trying to do something my body hadn't been asked to do for a very long time. My legs felt weak. Everything looked different. The lights seemed incredibly bright and Mom and Dad were not cheering me on. The whole experience felt slightly foreign, like I had landed on another planet where everyone somehow expected me to know how to play baseball.
I felt like a kid again, but not quite the kid I remembered.
Then I switched gloves.
I slid my hand into that old Wilson.
And suddenly I wasn't only in Loretto anymore.
I was back at Pioneer Park. I was behind what is now the middle school. I was a kid playing baseball again.
I was playing catch with Dad.
I was playing catch with Dad and my son.
Memories I hadn't gone looking for came flooding back, attached somehow to an old piece of leather that my hand still knew perfectly well.
The pocket was where it was supposed to be. Of course it was. Dad and I had put it there all those years ago.
My fingers went where they had always gone. The glove closed the way it had always closed.
Something else happened, too.
The legs that had felt weak suddenly had some strength. My vision seemed clearer. Those bright ballpark lights didn't seem quite so bright anymore.
I was ready to play baseball.
Let's be clear, what happened next will not be optioned for a Hollywood sports movie.
I had one ball come my way in the field, and it was horribly over my head. There was no diving catch, no dramatic throw across the diamond and no moment when everyone stopped and marveled at the old guy.
At the plate, I went 0-for-2.
But I made contact.
I fouled pitches off. I competed. On one play, I came within about two steps of getting on base against one of the better 50-plus pitchers in the state.
After not seeing live pitching for decades, I'll take that.
And the old glove?
It held up just fine.
In the days afterward, however, I started looking at it more closely. The leather was dry. The laces had aged. It had a decidedly musty smell from years of storage. The glove still felt good, but it was obvious that four decades had passed.
So, I started researching how to restore an old baseball glove.
That turned out to be the wrong word.
I don't want to restore it.
Restoration implies returning something to what it once was. I don't want my glove to look like it did when Dad and I brought it home from the store.
Every dark spot in the pocket belongs there.
Every scuff belongs there.
The creases belong there.
The worn basket web belongs there.
Even the way the leather has changed color tells part of its story.
What I really want to do is preserve it while making sure it can still do the job it was made to do.
That means treating an old glove differently than a new one. Years ago, the solution to a stiff glove often seemed to be glove oil, and lots of it. Today, there are cleaners and water-based conditioners designed to replenish leather without saturating it with heavy oils. With an old glove, the advice is to go slowly, remove surface dirt gently, test cleaners in inconspicuous areas and condition the leather lightly rather than soaking it.
Old laces deserve special attention, too. Conditioner may make dry leather feel better, but it cannot restore the strength of a lace that has deteriorated. If this glove is going back onto a baseball field, those laces need to be inspected, and anything structurally questionable needs to be replaced.
The goal isn't to make it new.
The goal is to make sure it is ready to be used again. If nothing else, ready to be used again for when my grandkids are ready to play catch.
Somewhere in the middle of researching all of this, I realized I might not have been researching only a baseball glove.
At 52, maybe there is something to be learned from an old Wilson A2124.
You don't have to erase every scar.
You don't have to look the way you did when you were 20.
You don't need to pretend the years haven't happened.
Maybe you take care of what needs taking care of. Maybe you strengthen or replace the parts that aren't holding up anymore. Maybe you accept that some things don't move as quickly as they once did.
Maybe, like Tony helped me discover at practice, the only way to find out what still works is to get off the sidelines and try it.
Then you see what you've still got.
There is something else I've learned about old baseball gloves.
You can buy another one.
I could walk into a sporting goods store tomorrow and buy a technologically superior glove. The leather would be new. The laces would be strong. There would be a size and design engineered specifically for whatever position I wanted to play.
It wouldn't have a pocket Dad helped me make when I was 12.
It wouldn't remember Pioneer Park.
It wouldn't remember the field behind the school.
It wouldn't remember playing catch with my dad and my son.
That old George Brett Wilson does.
For more than a decade, I've had one of the best seats in the house at Veterans Park. I've announced games, watched players come and go, coached, helped run a baseball organization and seen more baseball than I could ever begin to count.
I've watched other people step into the batter's box more than a thousand times.
Maybe somewhere along the way I became too comfortable believing that was where I belonged, close enough to the game to love it, but safely outside the lines.
Dad probably would have had something to say about that.
I don't know how much more baseball is in the glove, and at 52, I certainly don't know how much more baseball is in me. Maybe I'll get another game. Maybe I'll get a season. Maybe I'll discover that baseball at this age is considerably more fun to play than it is to recover from the morning after playing it.
That's OK.
For one night in Loretto, I wasn't the announcer.
I wasn't the board president.
I wasn't the coach.
I wasn't watching somebody else play baseball.
I was a baseball player again.
I didn't get a hit. I didn't make a great play. Nobody is going to look up the box score years from now and wonder about the night I returned to the game.
But I stood in a batter's box again.
I swung.
I made contact.
I put my hand into the same glove Dad helped me pick out about 40 years ago, and I played baseball.
My reaction time was awful, but it was there.
I was there.
Because, as Dad would say, "I ain't dead yet."
