"Has Anyone Here Played Midnight Baseball? I'm Trying to Remember the Last Rule" | ClancyPasta PRESENTS

[00:00:02] Has Anyone Here Played Midnight Baseball? I'm Trying to Remember the Last Rule. Thy Measured Anomaly. And you can find more of his stories on reddit at you slash measured anomaly. And you're listening to ClancyPasta.

[00:00:22] When I was a kid, we treated Midnight Baseball just like any other fairy tale. No different from Candyman, Bloody Mary, or any of those other slumber party games meant to scare the shit out of you or let you prove how brave you were.

[00:00:46] Except this one had real incentive to play. Something won instead of something lost. I figured it was just a piece of New England lore and chalked it up to being yet another example of how superstitious that area could get. Somewhere on the scale between Stephen King and the Salem Witch Trials.

[00:01:10] But when I moved to the big city for college, I found out it wasn't quite as regional as I thought. Seems like the midnight hour's been a busy time for a lot of diamonds. I've been putting out feelers around a few places, trying to make sure I've got it right, and a few odd ducks have told me their war stories in the process.

[00:01:40] From neighborhood dive bars to VFW lodges up north, I've heard pretty much the same spiel. So far, so good. The ropes people have been telling me, Jai, with pretty much the way I remember the tales as a kid. Here are the rules I've gotten more or less everyone to agree on. One.

[00:02:07] You can play at pretty much any baseball field. No field owes you anything, but it's easier to get a chance to play if someone nearby has recently lost a bet. The worse, the better. I heard from Fred over in the East Hills that the very first game of midnight baseball happened in 1919, a few weeks after the Black Sox threw the World Series.

[00:02:37] Never let a good crisis go to waste and all that. Kenny and I tried our own luck sophomore year in the fall of 2008. As you might remember, there were a lot of people losing bets around then. Two. Between midnight and 3am. Approach. Home plate.

[00:03:03] If the game wants to play with you too, there will be a bat waiting. There will also be a ball on the pitcher's mound. Don't bring your own. If they're not there, you don't get to play that night. Go home. Some fields are lit. Others aren't. But there's not an advantage either way.

[00:03:33] Being a little bit of a pansy, young me picked a dark diamond on purpose. I heard about what sometimes stands beyond the lights, and I knew I'd lose my nerve if I could see it. Three. There's one pitcher and one batter. Whichever you are, bring a friend who you trust to be the other.

[00:04:02] For me, that was a no-brainer. Kenny had been my roommate since freshman year, and there was nobody I trusted more. Four. The batter and the pitcher each make a potential wish. The batter's wish is granted if he gets home. The pitcher's is granted if the batter uses all three pitches without making it home.

[00:04:36] As far as I know, nothing is off the table. I'd known what my wish was going to be since I met Brenda in U.S. history. One. The year before. Five. Five. Either both of you lose, or one of you wins. And no game is ever played with the same players twice. In other words, you each get one chance at it.

[00:05:04] You can't try again with another wish, another partner, or the other position. All or nothing. No. No. No. Do-overs. Kenny had been the quarterback of his high school football team until a nasty shin injury ended that. When I visited his house, there were pictures of him in a wheelchair.

[00:05:34] By the time we were roommates, he did one-arm push-ups and walked with a limp. And great arm and a bad leg. Both good reasons for him to be the pitcher. Six. Bring a fistful of something related to your wish. If you're the batter, trail it behind you to drop at each of the bases.

[00:06:02] If you're the pitcher, it doesn't matter where you keep it. I took the movie stubs from my first date with Brenda and shredded them into four little piles. One for each base. By the time Kenny and I were taking the subway out to the field I had picked in Coney Island, I had one pile in each pocket.

[00:06:31] Couldn't let my nerves have me emptying the entire symbol of my wish on the run to first base. Kenny kept his token in his pocket. I never asked what it was. Seven. You get three pitches. The pitcher wins if you use all three without making it home.

[00:06:58] The batter only needs to make it home once. Anything else still uses up one of your three. Break one of the other rules, though. And your own wish is forfeit. That's how you can both lose. My first swing whiffed completely. Good start, slugger. Kenny called from the mound.

[00:07:27] I flipped him off. He laughed. You know I can see that, right? Not all of us have night vision as shit as you do. Kenny threw again. I connected on the second pitch, but sent it straight back toward him. Damn. I couldn't follow the ball in the dark. I only heard the smack of it hitting leather. There we go, Kenny said.

[00:07:58] From what little I can make out of him in the moonlight. Kenny looked loose now, rocking slightly on his good leg as he turned the ball over in his glove. Come on, he called. One more. It sounded like encouragement. Eight. Eight. If you're the pitcher, both feet stay on the mound until the game is over.

[00:08:27] Whatever you hear, whatever you see, whatever happens, you stay there. Step off, and your wish is forfeit. All the versions I heard of this were weirdly specific about keeping both feet on the mound. Nine. If the pitcher misses the hit, the batter runs.

[00:08:58] Drop your tokens at each base and stay on the baseline. Something will try to tag you before you make it home. If it taps you before you make it home, that's another strike. Nick, return to home plate if you have any strikes to spare. Never look behind you to see what touched you.

[00:09:23] My third swing was the one that got past Kenny. I ran. The moon was bright enough to pick the bleached out bases against the toasty dirt, but not much else. I dropped the first piece of Brenda's movie ticket over first. Then I heard another runner behind me.

[00:09:51] That's exactly what it sounded like. Sneakers pounding the dirt. A man breathing hard through his mouth. For half a second I thought it was Kenny, but even if Kenny had broken the rule the instant the ball went over his head, there was no way he could have gotten behind me that fast. Not with his leg. The runner was gaining.

[00:10:18] I rounded second and dropped the next piece of ticket. The footsteps rounded with me. I heard the scrape of a shoe cutting the turn. Then the quickened stride coming out of it. Whoever was behind me certainly knew how to run bases. I ran harder. By the time I was closing in on third, I could hear every breath.

[00:10:46] The footfalls were almost landing with mine. Then I felt something brush the fabric over my shoulder blade. But I didn't feel anything solid. It's skin. I don't know whether that counted as a tap, but I wasn't about to stop and find out. If it counted, I was already done.

[00:11:16] I dropped the next piece at third and turned for home. The runner came with me. That was when I made the mistake. I wanted to know how close it was. My head started to turn. Don't look! Kenny's voice cracked in a half scream across the field. I snapped forward.

[00:11:44] A hand passed through the moonlight beside my face. That's all I saw. Finger shapes. Close enough that I felt the air move against my cheek. Kenny was still screaming. Go! Go! Go! The footsteps were right behind mine now. I could hear the runner reaching for me in the rhythm of his stride.

[00:12:10] Three steps, a fourth landing harder as he lunged. Something grazed the back of my shirt as I jumped for home plate. I dropped the last scrap as I came down. My foot hit the bone-white shape in the dirt just as something touched my shoulder. I hit the ground hard enough to skin both palms.

[00:12:36] For a second, I stayed there, unsure whether I'd been tapped too soon or just late enough. Then, I heard the cheering. Nobody was in the bleachers. I could see enough of the steel under the moonlight to be sure of that. But my god, it sounded like there were hundreds of, well, something.

[00:13:04] I could hear yelling, whistling, clapping, and stomping against the aluminum benches. I could see Kenny's silhouette on the mound, shoulders slumped. When he finally walked over, his limp was worse than it had been on the way in.

[00:13:28] I felt a little bad for him, but we both knew going into it that there could only be one winner. Ten. You can't deliberately throw the game to give the other person the win. If you do, neither of you gets anything. It knows.

[00:14:00] According to the stories from some of the guys I talked to, though, the opposite doesn't seem to bother it. Players have lied to each other, distracted each other, even tried to make the other person break a rule, and the game still counted. Maybe that's the point. It doesn't want cooperation. It wants a winner.

[00:14:30] So, I'll repeat rule three. Bring a friend you trust. Now, I've talked to a bunch of different people about this. All the minor league players at the clubhouse bar and the peewee dads who bring their kids in for pizza gave me more or less the same story. There are little differences here and there, but nothing that changes the game much.

[00:14:58] There is one last thing everyone I've talked to agrees on. It's what happens to the equipment. If neither of you wins, leave everything where it falls. You've had your turn.

[00:15:18] If the pitcher wins, the ball goes back on the mound and the batter leans the bat against the chain link fence or rolls it over into the dugout or something. But if you win as the batter, you get to take the bat home. I've always thought it was strange how much more ceremony there is when the batter wins. He's the one who scatters pieces of his wish around the diamond.

[00:15:48] He's the one who gets chased. He's the one who gets chased. He's the one the crowd cheers for. He's the only winner who takes something home. Maybe that's just baseball. Everybody watches the guy running for home or maybe the game wants something different from its batters. Nobody I've asked seems to know.

[00:16:17] I thought all this was ancient history until yesterday. After more than a decade of losing touch, Kenny called me. He was back in town for our 15th college reunion and wanted to catch up with Brenda and me. Brenda and Kenny had been in journalism club together and knew each other even before I dated her. So of course we had him over.

[00:16:45] The girls were staying with Brenda's folks last night. So the three of us sat around our kitchen table drinking and talking about college. Kenny was the one who brought up midnight baseball. God, remember how seriously we took that shit? He said. Nobody could even agree on the rules.

[00:17:06] Hard to believe you actually won me playing a game in Coney Island, she said. I always told you you're a lucky man. Luckiest bastard I know, Kenny said. That turned into us trying to figure out what the rules actually were.

[00:17:32] We spent the rest of the night comparing what we remembered and digging through old message boards. For extra credit, we even went to Armburro's sports bar for research. The list above is the gist of what we came up with by the time we were back at the kitchen table. At one point, Kenny stood up and nearly went sideways. He caught himself on the wall.

[00:18:03] Damned bum leg, he said laughing. Still forget I can't put my weight down wrong on it. Burned me before. You'd think I'd learn. Eventually, Brenda went to bed, saying she'd swing by the library tomorrow morning. Today. She planned to spend today seeing if she could find anything older than Fred's 1919 story.

[00:18:33] Kenny and I kept yacking, and the old bat came up. I still had it, of course. I'd dragged the damn thing through every apartment Brenda and I ever lived in. Now it was collecting dust in my office closet. I handed it to him. He turned it over in his hands. Can't believe you kept this stupid thing.

[00:19:04] Then he passed it back and said he needed some sleep. He slept in the guest room and left early this morning, before I even got up. I must have hit the research hard, because Brenda was out and probably already at the library by now. I've been cleaning while I wait for Brenda's parents to check in like they always do when they have the girls.

[00:19:31] It's almost noon now, so I've got a lot tidied up. Bottles and glasses in the kitchen. Towels and trash from the guest room. Yellowed shreds of newspaper under the bed. I figure they'd been there a while. God knows the last time I cleaned under there. Some of them are even from the 2000s.

[00:19:55] I was cleaning my office when something very wrong hit me about the equipment rule. I texted Brenda. No answer back yet. I've called Kenny twice. Straight to voicemail. Brenda's parents still haven't called.

[00:20:26] So I have one more rule I need help with. What happens if you lose the bat?