1994 | Little League Barbeque, Spring Valley, Callifornia
By the time of this picture, I had not played much baseball since I was in Little League myself, aging out in 1960. Nevertheless, I was assigned the opportunity to serve as deputy assistant coach to my son’s team.
As a boy, I had difficulty judging the trajectory of fly balls to my outfield positions; I was good with the short bloopers and could charge them successfully for an out, but I more often ran right under the long fly balls and had to make a quick turn and chase them down as they evaded me.
By 1994, however, as I worked with the kids in practice, roaming with them on the big open field behind the diamond, Coach Jerry was banging out soaring 300-foot shots to give the boys a thrill. I found that I was able to judge the ball well and bring a lot of them in if the kids weren’t willing (the orbs were dropping down from far above with what seemed like terminal velocity). After feeling surprisingly competent finally, I reasoned that all my intervening years judging distance while driving, sailing, skiing, and flying radio-controlled sailplanes must have given me excellent 3-D training.
A year or two after this picture, my son and I threw the ball around at 10,000-feet on the shoulder of Nevada’s Wheeler Peak, and I had to do some re-learning — through only seventy percent of sea-level atmospheric pressure, Alex’s strong throws had dead-flat trajectories.