Living ‘the dream’ on trip back home

You know how people talk about knowing how to do something so well they could do it in their sleep?

That literally happened to me last week.

I woke up from a dream in which I was a 16-year-old kid again, going through the pregame infield for the Fort Dodge baseball team. I even heard coach Ed McNeil after the infield as we gathered in front of the dugout just before the game started. Talk about time travel! (That was 45 years ago.)

I think I know why I had that dream. A few days earlier I had gone to Fort Dodge to meet up with two boyhood neighborhood friends who were back in town. They live in Los Angeles and Rochester, Minnesota now.

We met up with a couple of other guys we knew and went to the home Fort Dodge Senior High baseball game against Marshalltown. It was the first time I had been in Dodger Stadium for a game since I was an 18-year-old college freshman working part-time for the Fort Dodge Messenger.

The previous years I toiled many hot afternoons on that field for coach McNeil. (They didn’t install lights in that historic stadium, with ivy-covered brick outfield walls like Wrigley Field, until just a few years ago.)

When I was playing 12-year-old baseball, Fort Dodge won a state championship in 1969 under coach McNeil, a stickler for detail who had played in the Brooklyn Dodgers organization. That year, they played a close district tournament game against a spunky Fonda OLGC team coached by a young Vic Belger, who would go on to coach some great Creston teams later in the 1980s and 1990s. (One of Belger’s driver’s ed students at OLGC was Deb Imming, who would become my wife someday. Small world.)

Coach McNeil’s standards were high. As a player you did everything you could to not disappoint him. One of those things was executing the pregame infield session to perfection.

Every. Single. Time.

Coach McNeil felt the pregame infield execution set the tone for the game and sent a message to the other dugout. When we swiftly went through the infield process without anyone saying a word — every step was completely memorized — with the ball never hitting the ground, it was a thing of beauty. The other team was mentally intimidated and we knew it.

As an infielder, I knew I had to receive the outfield cutoff throw with my footwork exactly how coach wanted it, so that I could instantly step correctly toward my throw to the base. Without that footwork, I was likely to make an errant throw.

Besides stepping correctly toward my target every time I threw, I had to have my throwing hand close to the glove as I caught it, so the transfer from glove to hand was so quick it was almost instantaneous. There was no lollygagging of catching and lazily taking it out of the glove to make a throw.

There was nothing sloppy about the process at all. It was done with extreme attention to detail. If he dressed you down for how you performed during it, you learned to take your medicine. Coach had a "no excuses" policy. (To this day, excuses get under my skin.)

As I laid in bed and thought about that dream of stepping back into that time for an instant, I recalled watching a high school team earlier this summer go through its infield. I cringed when I saw a player take a throw and just fling the ball toward a teammate at third base without even shifting his feet toward that base.

The body language of that team’s infield that day was so different than what I grew up with. Outfield throws missed the cutoff. Throws to the plate went past the catcher to the screen. It was a scene in which coach McNeil’s face would have turned beet red, and his demeanor in the dugout would have let us know in no uncertain terms that we weren’t properly prepared to compete.

Now, to be fair, baseball lineups today are much younger than varsity squads of the past. In the 1970s most varsity starting nines were heavily senior-oriented. Many of us were still playing JV games as juniors, waiting for a chance to crack the lineup. From ninth through 12th grades there were probably 35 guys on the squad. After the cuts.

So, it’s understandable for younger kids to not have the precision and execution of young men 18 and 19 years old who were playing on the teams I remembered.

One of the guys sitting in our group last week at the Dodger game told me a story about playing summer ball against Ozzie Smith when the Cardinals Hall of Fame shortstop was playing for the Clarinda A’s. I told him I interviewed Ozzie at a Clarinda A’s banquet many years ago.

The experience in that stadium spurred a lot of memories. Apparently, so much so that it triggered a dream of bygone days.

I think the lasting lesson from those days of executing a pregame session for a demanding leader was the value of preparation and high standards. Coach McNeil may not have realized it, but he taught me lessons that carried over to my chosen career.

Unconsciously, I think I was trying to execute a perfect pregame infield every time I sat down to do a story, or lay out a page. Attention to detail, and not settling for sloppy execution, drove me every day throughout those years.

Thanks, coach!

•••

Contact the writer:

Twitter: @larrypeterson

Email: lpeterson@crestonnews.com