Hey Dad, Wanna Have a Catch?
On Baseball and the Grace that Shows Up in a Backyard
Every year, the week of Opening Day, I watch the movie, Field of Dreams. It's a ritual and it is pretty non-negotiable. And because I am going to cry, I watch it alone.
When I say cry, I am not talking about some polite tear or two. I am talking about the kind of crying that sneaks up on you even though you know exactly what's coming — because you've seen it more times than you can count and it wrecks you every single time.
You probably know the ending. Ray Kinsella, standing in a cornfield in Iowa, realizes the young ballplayer who has walked out of the corn is his father — his father as a young man, before life got complicated, before things went wrong. And after everything — after all the wondering and the waiting and the not knowing — Ray looks at him and says, voice barely holding together:
"Hey Dad... wanna have a catch?"
I lose it every time -- I mean every single time. Because I know that question. I have carried it my whole life. I just never had anywhere to put it.
My father's name was Larry. He left when I was very young — so young that I have no memory of him. I don’t remember his voice or his face or the smell of him or his laugh. I mean he was there (I guess), and then he wasn't, like a foul ball that disappears into the stands and doesn't come back.
You can't grieve what you don't understand. And for a long time I didn't understand what was missing. I just knew something was.
Baseball found me somewhere in that emptiness. I can't explain it exactly — the game just had a steadiness to it that nothing else did. Maybe it was the long season; the fact there was always another game the next day. Or maybe it is the way failure is built right into the game's DNA, and you're considered great if you succeed three times out of ten. There was grace in that. There was room in that for a kid who was still figuring out what he was made of without a father around to tell him.
You know, I never had a catch with Larry. Not once. He was gone before that could happen, and there was no cornfield waiting for us, no magic that could bring him back across the years to stand in my backyard on a summer evening and throw me the ball.
For a long time I thought that was simply the wound I would carry. The unanswered question. The catch that never happened. And maybe it is. Some absences don't fill — they just become something you learn to live alongside, like a room in your house you don't go into very often but never quite forget is there.
I've written about THE glove before — Larry’s glove. (Some of you know this story.) But Opening Day has me reaching for it again, the way you reach for certain things when the season turns. It’s a worn left-handed glove that I found years ago in a box among papers and old certificates — the only thing he left behind besides the questions. It sits in my office now. I see it every single day. It never fit right. It never could — he was a southpaw and I never knew that about him until I slipped my hand inside and felt the wrongness of it. A left-handed glove for a right-handed boy whose father never stayed long enough to find out which hand he threw with.
That glove is my Unlikely Altar. The one I didn't choose and can't seem to put away. The one that sits there quietly every morning when I come in to write, or get on the phones, holding all the questions I never got to ask, reminding me of the catch that never happened.
But then one afternoon, not so long ago, something happened. I was in the backyard with one of my adult sons. We grabbed gloves and I tossed him a ball. He threw it back. And just like that, without any ceremony or swelling music or ghosts emerging from the corn, we were having a catch.
No soundtrack. No magic. Just a dad and his kid, the ball moving back and forth between them in the late afternoon light.
That backyard didn't give me my dad. It didn't fix the absence or answer the question I've been carrying since before I knew I was carrying it.
But it did something else. It rewrote the ending. It said the story that started with a father who left doesn't have to end there. That I get to choose something different.
The catch I never had with Larry became the catch I get to have with my boys. And somewhere in that exchange — the ball leaving my hand, crossing the space between us, landing safe in his glove — I felt something I can only call grace. Grace found in reconciliation. Not with the man I never knew, but with the story itself. With the fact that it didn't break me. With the fact that I'm here, throwing the ball, showing up.
Maybe that is why I love Opening Day so much. It is like the Resurrection itself. It gives us the chance to rewrite our story. You see, on Opening Day every single team is in first place. There are no losers yet and no broken hearts. No October collapses to recover from. Just thirty ball clubs and thirty sets of fans walking back in through the gates believing — fully, without reservation — that this is the year.
The slate is wiped clean, the thing you were sure was finished turning out to not be finished at all. Hope springs eternal, they say — and they've been saying it for years because it keeps being true. Every Opening Day, the whole beautiful impossible season begins again.
It is all about grace and second chances. But more than that, it is like a right-handed boy who spent a lifetime reaching for a catch he thought he'd never have — and then one ordinary afternoon, in a backyard with his son, discovered he already had everything he'd been looking for.
Happy Opening Day. Go find someone to have a catch with. I have a feeling somebody out there needs it as much as you do.
