8 minute read
NO BATS BASEBALL
This is a story written by my friend, Ted Simendinger, who founded “No Bats Baseball Club” in an effort to promote charity and goodwill through the game of baseball. To date, they’ve donated over $1.7 million.
I founded No Bats by accident in 1991. I was in my mid-thirties, that gray zone of a man’s life where athleticism oozes toward patheticism without warning. Spring training news was on ESPN, I hadn’t played hardball since high school, and I missed it. Women and college had gotten in the way, and both were shoved aside by the distractions of a real job and monthly bills that seemed to arrive daily. Neckties saw more action than me.
A friend urged me to rent out Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida. I did and word spread. The drumbeats of other mid-life males were loud. Within one day 42 guys signed on to participate, a number that mushroomed to 60 before I quickly circled the wagons. I wasn’t in this for the money—I straight-lined the cost and divided it out—and invented something the folks at Dodgertown had never seen: a baseball fantasy camp where no one good was coming to play. To juice things up I invited Kevin Costner, who passed. Pete Rose was willing to come if he got paid. Neither was missed. A close pal of mine, Smilin’ Jay Davis, an entrepreneurial sort killed by a drunk driver last summer while being a dad to one of his five lovely daughters, helped me organize that first season. When our beautiful October opening day arrived, Smiler was so excited he drove up early but forgot our uniforms in his garage. He did what few men would do after messing up en route to a male bonding weekend: Smiler called his wife, a petite saint of a woman nine months pregnant with their first child, told her to load and drive the uni’s ninety miles north up I-95, drop them off, and leave. Dutifully, she did. Thanks to Susie Davis, we looked better than we played. With the exception of one season in Alvin, Texas where our nipples bled from mesh uniforms due to a sadistic fashion choice by a guy named Johnny G, No Bats ballplayers typically look okay waddling onto the field.
The emphasis that first season was on brotherhood and friendship, not winning and losing. We chose sides to keep the teams even and pitched to our teammates so everyone could feel the joy of hitting a hardball with a pro wood bat. The crack of the bat is magic to a man, as is the smell of a good leather glove. It was these things I wanted to protect— the emotional experience of a safe haven for every man—throughout a long, fun weekend where every man was equal. Time has proven this to be the magic of the No Bats way: We are kindred souls who give more than we take, support each other, and strive to be positive influences on the lives of others.
Smiler and I had a structure around what we were doing that first season but not a lot of rules. I settled on four, which worked well then and have remained steadfast ever since: No wives. No kids. No drugs. No arguing. They worked then and still work now, the only rules we’ve ever needed.
It didn’t take long before I knew we were onto something good. The first run in club history was scored by a Boston mailman who stumbled while running home, lost his balance, and landed face-first on home plate. He got up smiling, not whining, and had accomplished what each of us set out to do: He had circled the bases and relived a happy childhood memory.
The four-team tournament ended up with a stunning upset in a driving rain, which somehow seemed fitting. The winners were inspired by a Baltimore guy who knew a lot about seamless gutters. Frenchie’s pre-game speech inspired the underdogs.
“We may not win the game,” he said, “but we will win the party.” His teammates took it from there and the shocking, against-all-odds Miracle in Mud capped a truly transcendent weekend.
As we have each autumn since, the guys showed up on a Thursday, leave on a Sunday, and never seem anxious to go. After returning home that inaugural season, Annapolis schoolteacher Jon Braun was asked how the weekend went. He looked at the guy and slowly shook his head.
“It was like Vietnam,” he said. “If you weren’t there, you’d never understand.” That inaugural season turned into a second, followed by a third. By then I realized we needed to hit the road, so we did. Thanks to the support of Nolan Ryan, who has hosted us three times in three different cities, many Major League stars and ballclubs have invited us, as have minor league teams. Aside from the Arizona Diamondbacks, who confiscated our water and Gatorade and put a minibar of their own in a trash can of ice in each dugout, most of the franchises have been quite generous.
For a long time now, the backbone of our annual No Bats weekend has involved giving back to charity. We are, in many ways, the ideal guest. No Bats visits a community, spends tourist dollars, raises and donates significant amounts of money for their host organization’s chosen charities, and leave. Houseguests with a purpose, so to speak.
Since finding our charity legs in year five, we have raised and donated nearly $1.7 million, a total driven largely by the energies and efforts of Ted Darby, a real estate title executive from Plano, Texas, and Dan Carroll, an accountant from Chicago. Darb is old, DC is young. They cross generations but share a giver’s soul. Such is the baton handoff of lives well lived.
The No Bats charity purpose is overlaid by the quote, “A man’s life means nothing, “except for the impact it has on others.” These are words paraphrased from a speech given late in life by Jackie Robinson and pretty much captures why we do what we do, and the spirit in which we do it.
No Bats visits a new city each year and exposes our members and donors to new causes. Ours are weekends of positive rejuvenation. Each attendee is warmly embraced by what has grown into a strong, true brotherhood. Mortality, we know, is very inconvenient; and will ruin a lot of weekends.
About sixty guys show up each year and most have been doing it for more than fifteen years. More than a hundred men from coast to coast, plus Russia and the Bahamas, belong to No Bats but some years fit better into life than others. Steve Mayer joined early and has been to nearly every one. Mayer’s career is noteworthy for two things, one being that he is one of the very few who improved throughout the years, and the other being his habit of routinely shagging fly balls in left field with his glove on his left hand while his cell phone is against his ear with his right.
Each year I remind the guys, “The power of us is us. If we stick together, we’ll be okay.” Time has proven true that days drag but years fly and as we age we will all take turns in the barrel. The number of hands reaching in to help pull a man out will equal the number of times he has reached in to help others. We have proved this countless times.
The No Bats Baseball Club has shared some remarkably joyous and tragic things. None of the guys takes for granted the power of loyal support in times of need. Each man knows that even the strong are broken in places, and none among us is allowed to walk a troubled road alone. Ours is a fraternity of healing and support and all of us share pride of being a true friend to every man who has contributed emotional equity to make it that way.
I have seen fathers and sons play ball together, and brothers and others mend fences. We deal with the physical and emotional scars of aging, job loss, death, and divorce. Ours is a safe haven. Every man is embraced as an equal and pro-
tected as family, which are non-negotiable membership dues we pay and collect.
Nearly three decades after birthing the No Bats Baseball Club, three things I know for sure: 1. Baseball is a team game, played by individuals. In that regard it’s just like life. The game will let a man be a hero; and turn around to humble the best. The ball finds everyone, sometimes on successive pitches. 2. Each year the bases creep farther away. Home-to-first is nearly a half-mile. Legging out a triple takes twelve minutes with a favorable wind, fifteen without. 3. Nothing—and I mean nothing—does more for a man’s soul than a solid line-drive base hit smacked with a wooden bat. In these strobe-lit moments of life, every man stands immortal. I could wrap this up by bragging that No Bats club records include three guys being hospitalized on one play (runner, fielder, and third base coach), or that two guys—the batter and infielder—pulled hamstrings on the very first pitch of a tournament. I could reveal super-secret baseball trivia, that the final out in historic Wrigley Field was made by Virginia Beach investment analyst Chip Ford, who hit a five-hopper to second base at twilight the day before the bulldozers began Wrigley’s major renovation. But that stuff is bragging, and some things a man should keep to himself.
Instead I will close with a quote from Mark Costigan, a Chicago cabinetmaker. When asked during one of our weekends by a curious spectator to explain No Bats action out on the field, Costigan shrugged and said, “Well, it looks like baseball from a helicopter.”
Warn the good folks in Cincinnati: The choppers are heading your way.
