A few weeks ago, I smelled the mud for the first time this spring.

Growing up in Northeast Ohio, I longed for that initial waft of awakening earth after the ghostly-gray Midwestern winter. It meant bike rides and short sleeves and sunshine, but more than anything, it meant baseball.

From ages 6 to 16, I played Little League and high school ball, and I was pretty good – well, for nine of those 10 years anyway. Like most kids, I got my first taste of organized baseball through T-ball, and I was hooked from the start. Obsessed, even. For the next decade, through the minor, major and senior leagues of Cuyahoga Falls Little League North and two years at Falls High, baseball consumed me. When I wasn’t in uniform, my summers were mostly spent playing pickup games in and around the neighborhood – wiffle ball at my house, tennis ball in the parking lot behind the office building up the street, proper hardball on the rare days we could find an open field and enough kids to scrounge together a game. Even alone in my backyard, I pitched simulated nine-inning games by throwing a tennis ball at a strike zone I marked on the side of the garage. I took my glove to school, on family vacations to the beach, anywhere there may have been an opportunity to squeeze in a game of catch.

When I wasn’t playing the game, I was usually head-down in something related – sorting baseball cards, playing Baseball Stars on NES, reading Baseball Digest, Baseball Weekly or the Akron Beacon Journal baseball page. April through October, I was usually watching baseball on TV, listening on the radio or taking in a game with my father at Cleveland’s cavernous Mistake On the Lake, Municipal Stadium. Cable television was a godsend. When the Indians weren’t on local TV, I could usually find an Atlanta Braves game on SuperStation WTBS, so in addition to Cleveland’s roster I got well-acquainted with Dale Murphy, Chris Chambliss and bearded greats like Bruce Sutter. When ESPN secured baseball rights and started airing doubleheaders, this preteen kid stayed up way too late watching all the way through the end of the West Coast game, volume down and inches from the screen to keep from waking my parents.

It’s been said that the ’80s were the last golden age of childhood – the last time a generation grew up without the ubiquitous insistence of the Internet, the last time kids could roam their world for hours without checking in with Mom, the last time parents trusted that world enough to say, “Just be home when the street lights come on.” And it was, indeed, an idyllic childhood, and baseball played a starring role. Baseball was fun, and it came naturally to me. I was never much of a pitcher, but I preferred the field anyway, especially chasing down fly balls in the outfield. At the plate, I was a trusty line-drive hitter in the heart of the lineup – I made contact, got on base, drove in runs and stole my way into scoring position. I never hit one over the fence, but I did hit the fence once, and in fourth grade on the Minor League Mets I ended the season with a keg-league-softball-worthy batting average of .654. I remember these things because they were important to me. They still are.

Opening Day is this week, and every year I tell myself I’m going to look away. But I can’t look away. Not entirely, at least. Blame Cleveland for staying just competitive enough in recent years to keep my attention. When I was busy living my life in my 20s and early 30s, ignoring baseball was easy. I lived hours from a major league city, I had other interests and other concerns, and frankly, I stopped caring. But when Cleveland reached the World Series in 2016 and almost won it all, it rekindled my love for the game. Not enough to get cable and immerse myself in the minutiae of analytics – I still don’t understand the new stats and never will – but enough to buy a new fitted block-C cap and follow the regular season in the newspaper like a proper old man. Once we knew our new address after buying a house in Northeast Ohio last summer, the first Cleveland map search I typed into my phone was to see how far we were from Progressive Field. Yes, I looked up a baseball stadium before I looked up a record store. I’m just as surprised as you.

Admittedly, my sabbatical from baseball was partially due to the chip on my shoulder – and not a physical one from some long-ago head-first Charlie Hustle heroics (though I did break my pinky finger pulling that move in the hallway at Bolich Middle School, but that’s another story). Baseball left me in the dust when I was 17, and it took me a while to get up and brush myself off.

Going into ninth grade at Cuyahoga Falls High School, there were three levels of Division I Metro League baseball to climb: the freshman team, junior varsity and varsity. Each year, the program held tryouts to determine the three teams, and the majority of us trying out in ninth grade had played baseball together in some capacity since elementary school. In seventh and eighth grade, most of us were on the same Senior League traveling team, and we entered high school playing really, really well together. The energy, experience and confidence we brought with us to tryouts was palpable.

I almost didn’t make it through conditioning, though. Shortly after pre-tryout workouts commenced, I passed out at a sports card show at Summit Mall and broke my jaw when my face collided with the thinly-carpeted concrete floor. I woke up in an ambulance and spent the next week at Akron Children’s Hospital, where they examined my brain and my heart and wired my jaw shut for three weeks. Upon release, I resumed my teenage life with doctor’s orders to take my meals through a straw and take it easy. But I had business to take care of, and somehow I convinced my parents to let me go straight back to conditioning when I returned to school the next week.

The head of the Falls High baseball program at the time was an old-school type with a furrowed brow and a low tolerance for bullshit. He was a dickhead, too, to the full extent the world used to tolerate dickheads coaching children. He loomed large in the city’s baseball scene, a big fish who could show up anywhere in town and find himself quickly surrounded by blathering sycophants. If you grew up playing baseball in Cuyahoga Falls and you didn’t know who he was by the time you had armpit hair, you might as well have traded your glove for an oven mitt. He effectively instilled fear in all of us, and the bravely stupid ones among us went to great lengths to kiss his ass whenever the opportunity presented itself. I never played that game, but I certainly wasn’t going to lose favor with him or his underlings by letting a minor setback like a wired jaw keep me from going back to conditioning that Monday. Barely able to breathe – much less communicate – I ran stairs in our double-decker gymnasium with all the other hopefuls and never finished last. The freshman coach, who quickly rebranded me Jaws, repeatedly gave me an out on running the stairs, but I refused to take it. I’ve rarely exhibited grit in my life, but that late winter and early spring, I had grit. Making the team was more important than anything. Even girls.

I started every game that season, alternating between second base and outfield. We went 6-4 and proved to everyone we belonged in the uniform. It was easily the most fun I ever had playing baseball, and one of my best seasons. I finished the campaign leading the team in four offensive categories: batting average (.343), hits (12 in 35 at-bats), RBIs (10) and triples (1, a tie with two others). With the JV and varsity coaches watching from a distance, my prospects looked good for a future in baseball at Falls High.

Coming down off our first year of high school ball, it felt like a victory lap for those of us playing our final season with the Senior League traveling team that summer. Sitting in the dugout feeling like rock stars, we told tall tales of our glories to the younger kids and talked excitedly about playing JV ball the next year, and maybe, just maybe, playing well enough to earn individual call-ups to the varsity team.

We clearly got ahead of ourselves.

Most of us made it to JV our sophomore year. A couple guys got cut or didn’t try out, but the core of the freshman team remained intact. But it wasn’t the same team. We weren’t terrible – we ended the year 13-9 – but something was missing. We looked flat. We found ourselves grinding to wins when just one year prior we were gliding to them. Whatever spark had ignited us the season before had gone missing, and at the plate, I was missing, too. A lot. Somehow, at some point between tryouts and my first JV game, I forgot how to hit a baseball.

Some say hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. I’m not sure I agree with that, but that’s only because for nearly a decade of my life, hitting a round ball with a round bat came easily to me. Until it didn’t. Stepping into the batter’s box that spring felt like stepping into quicksand. I couldn’t find my footing, and it literally felt like I was sinking. I swung above the ball, I swung below the ball, and most of the time when I swung, I felt like I was going to fall. My batting average certainly did. After hitting .343 my freshman year, I ended my JV campaign barely above the Mendoza Line at .224, with a lone extra-base hit and 21 strikeouts in 49 official at-bats.

So what the hell happened? My vision changed slightly from ages 15 to 16, but I was still seeing the ball well enough to draw 14 walks in 64 plate appearances. You couldn’t blame booze or pot or a bad home life either. But it’s possible you could blame the MTV Buzz Bin.

I caught the music bug in middle school. Public Enemy and Nirvana were my two pillars of influence, the artists who turned me into a card-carrying fan. Most of the music I’ve explored over the past 30 years can be traced back to worn-out cassettes of Apocalypse 91 and Nevermind, and just like T-ball, those tapes quickly turned a first taste of something new into a terrific obsession. At 14, when I decided I needed – not wanted, mind you – a CD player, I started my own neighborhood lawn-mowing business and saved up all summer to buy a stereo. The record store a few blocks up on State Road started getting all the money I used to pour into the sports card shop down the street. Jars of nickels and quarters I saved for a year got turned into Pink Floyd and Police box sets. When I wasn’t at practice or a game, I was probably in the basement watching MTV until I was forced to relinquish the remote to my parents for primetime. When I discovered 120 Minutes one summer, West Coast baseball games suddenly had competition for my late-night TV attention. Baseball and the Buzz Bin had collided.

It was around this time that my focus started to fragment. For years, when I was on the baseball field, nothing else mattered. Then other things started to matter – namely, music and girls – and I started noticing things that had nothing to do with what I was doing on the field. Playing that last year of Senior League ball the summer of ’93, I was stationed in left field when I heard Stone Temple Pilots’ Core start blasting from a co-ed pool party at the apartment complex on the other side of the outfield fence. Our center-fielder Jason heard it, too. Front to back, the entire album got played, and Jason and I divided our time between shagging fly balls, singing along with Scott Weiland and silently wondering if something better awaited on the other side of the fence. Perhaps it’s telling that the only memory I have of a particular road victory that spring while playing for the freshman team was blasting Alice In Chains’ Dirt on my Discman on the bus ride home. Or that on April 8, 1994, I had just arrived at JV practice when our shortstop Josh, a fellow music obsessive, ran off the field to tell me Kurt Cobain had died. I remember these things because they were important to me. They still are.

When tryouts rolled around in late-winter of our junior year, most of us, in the absence of summer league play, had not touched a baseball since the final out of the final game of our frustrating sophomore season. Regardless, we had no reason to believe we would be anywhere else that spring but back in uniform for the JV team. There was a logjam of seniors ahead of us on varsity, and the likelihood of any of us moving up looked slim. It only seemed logical, then, that we’d be given another year to gel together on JV before the big show our senior year.

My hitting woes from the previous spring carried over into tryouts. I went in telling myself not to dwell on the past, that it was a fluke of a season, that slumps come and go and good hitters eventually break out of them. More than anything, I tried to avoid the mind games hitters find themselves playing when playing the game gets tough. But finding the ball with my bat only got tougher. I can still hear the thwap… thwap… thwap… of all those missed balls hitting the padded backstop in the Old Gym batting cage. Night after night, I went home and gnawed on this developing problem as I lied sleepless in the dark, searching for answers, only to return to the cage the next day with no solutions and no change in the results.

Tryouts concluded and I was still standing, which briefly eased the anxiety I was feeling about my future with the program. I made it this far, I figured, and if they had an excuse to cut me, I had given them plenty to work with in the batting cage. My teammates, all of whom had also made it through to the end of tryouts, were feeling equally confident.

Wisely, schools make kids wait until the end of the day to find out if they made a sports team or a school musical cast. It’s agonizing for the kids, but as an adult, I now understand why – it spares teachers the agony of dealing with emotionally undercooked teenagers in the throes of emotionally overcooked situations. Schools save the soul-crushing disappointment for the end of the day so it can be sent straight home for the parents to suffer. A stroke of evil genius.

On the day rosters were posted, the final bell rang and we congregated in the Old Gym. A twitchy, excited, elbow-y huddle formed around the three sheets of paper taped to the wall as we jockeyed to find our names. This is a tunnel-vision moment, with faint awareness of one’s surroundings, and as I awaited my fate, I paid little attention to the shifting atmosphere around me. When I finally got my turn, I scanned the JV roster and didn’t see my name. I double-checked. Triple-checked. Still nothing. I looked at the varsity roster and my name wasn’t there either. Then I looked one last time at the JV sheet to confirm my name was missing, and when I did, I noticed something else for the first time: Most of my teammates’ names were missing, too. In their place were the names of freshmen and sophomores we barely knew.

I took a step back, stunned and confused, and when I looked up, I saw my teammates in similar states of shock. Some, like me, stood vacant and speechless. Others yelled obscenities and indecipherable mono-syllables of unfiltered adolescent rage. As we slowly emerged from our individual fogs, we collectively realized what happened: We had been replaced by 14 and 15 year olds who were playing better baseball than us. In the days that followed, as we squawked amongst ourselves about this foul injustice, someone suggested we challenge these brace-faced little shits to a scrimmage. But the talk didn’t last long, and besides, the school would have put an end to it soon enough if we hadn’t dropped it ourselves. I don’t know what it would have proved anyway, other than proving we were sore losers – which, for a few weeks, was an accurate description of who we were.

You hear a lot of modern-day coaches and sports executives talk in shorthand about “trusting the process,” and this kind of talk usually comes at the beginning of a rebuilding period. Clearly the veteran coaches at Falls saw little in the way of process with our lumbering rag-tag crew. At best, we represented the next front line in the program’s endless march of mediocrity; at worst, a swing-and-a-miss step backward. The coaches, of course, saw something we didn’t: the future, and one that didn’t involve us. By senior year, no one from the Class of 1996 was playing baseball for the program, and few juniors remained. Meanwhile, the youth movement was slowly moving Falls High baseball up the state rankings. In 1999, Falls reached the Ohio Division I state championship game, falling 4-2 to a perennial Cincinnati powerhouse. I still feel awful that I once found joy in their defeat.

Never once did I think I’d play in college, but I took it as a given that I’d play baseball all the way through high school. And when I got cut, it positively crushed me, and 25 years later, I’d be lying if I said I’ve been able to shake it off completely. I dream about baseball at least a few times a year, and whether I’m a young me or an adult me, the scene is usually the same – I can’t hit the ball, and if I do, when I try to run to first an invisible force pushes against me, like I’m running in a resistance pool or a vat of corn syrup. Even in this alternate reality, this cosmic plane of my subconscious, the place where I can be a home run king or a jukebox hero or anyone else I want to be while no one is looking – even here, for the past quarter-century, I’ve been stuck in a slump. And I still haven’t hit one over the fence.

But it’s just a game, right? It wasn’t to the dozen kids who had their field of dreams bulldozed overnight. Our friendships had been forged on the diamond at an early age, but by high school, after weathering the social fragmentation of adolescence, baseball was the only thing most of us had left in common. And when we all got cut, it broke up the band for good. Few of us were hanging out socially by then, but it only widened the gap. We disappeared further into our separate worlds, we stopped interacting in the hallways, and by the end of high school I wasn’t even on head-nodding basis with some of the people I used to hug. We were reduced to strangers with familiar faces, young men adrift in the choppy waters of burgeoning adulthood, no longer kids with a game to bind us together.

Funny thing was, baseball didn’t even cross my mind senior year. I hadn’t swung a bat or picked up a ball since the last day of tryouts junior year, and going out for the team again would have felt like I was trying to connect with something that had been part of my past, or that had moved on without me, or both. And like Lou Reed sang, it was alright. Graduation was coming. My college plans were set. I was ready to leave town and not turn around for a while. Not even to look back with envy at the pool party behind the outfield fence.

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