By Louis A. Zona
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – For many years, baseball fans were treated to the antics of a clown who added laughter to every ballgame in which he made an appearance.
His name was Max Patkin, but he was best known as the Clown Prince of Baseball.
Dressed in an oversized baseball uniform, he would trip, fall, and swing and miss at every ball coming his way. He was hilarious and entertained fans in both minor league baseball as well as the major leagues. Particularly when the home team was playing miserably, Max was there to make sure that despite the not-so-great product on the field, at least there was laughter.
I was not a great baseball player. There were some nights that I felt like Max Patkin, with terrible attempts at bunting, and misjudging a fly ball or two. I was a serious player, but the good Lord did not supply me with enough talent to make the team – or even to not embarrass myself.
As I think back to my playing days, there were incidents that I can laugh about. Whenever I see my good friend from our days on the ballfield, we talk about our team being so bad that our manager abandoned us before the game ended. We got to the field in his van but did not ride back home with him after the game. I guess we were so terrible as a team that our manager did not want to be seen with us.
Part of my problem at one point was that I was generally smaller than the other guys in my grade and on the team due to having a birthday at the beginning of the summer. Don’t ask me, it never made any sense to me either. In any case, my birthday worked against me.
One of the truly amusing flubs that I created on the ballfield was playing third base – known as the hot corner because balls hit that way were on you so quickly there was little time to react. We were playing on the infield at the New Wilmington baseball field where I manned third base.
I fielded the first two balls hit my way, but the third one must have hit a stone, causing the ball to jump and hit me squarely on my left eye. I had a black eye for days, with the imprint of the baseball stitching beneath my eye – including at my brother Jerry’s wedding.
All pictures taken of me at the wedding show my shiner, an ongoing memory of one of the low points in my athletic career.
Well at least I got the black eye in somewhat of an honorable manner… on the ballfield!
On the day of one of my best days on the baseball diamond, when I struck out one of the best players in the county on three curveballs, I switched over to shortstop and totally misjudged a pop fly. It landed 15 feet away from me as I lay on my back, having fallen chasing that very high foul ball.
I again felt like Max Patkin, who probably would have laughed himself at my inability to catch that fly ball and looking ridiculous in the attempt.
That misadventure reminded me of the first President George Bush, who I would have wished for the same thing if I had thrown up on the Japanese prime minister at a dinner in his honor. As McCartney lay on the floor, he told the Secret Service to roll him under the table.
At one point in my not so lengthy career playing organized ball, I talked the coach into letting me pitch. I knew that he would go for it since our team was losing by 11 runs and there was little damage that I could do on the pitcher’s mound.
We were playing a really good team with a pitcher who ultimately played minor league. As I recall, his last name was Dennis. He was a man among boys. I wanted to strike him out so that the coach would realize that I could pitch with the best of them. It didn’t work out.
My first pitch to Mr. Dennis was hit so hard and so high that I wonder to this day if that ball made it into Earth’s orbit. Coach was not impressed.
And then there was the time that I hit a ground ball to the shortstop who tossed it to first base, hitting me squarely on my left ear. That throw must have been caused a ringing in my ear that I thought would be a forever memory.
Did I tell you that Mr. Dennis, the guy who hit the baseball across the Earth, had been playing shortstop and it was he who threw the ball at my ear? And that he picked up my glove at the end of the game?
Intimidated by this large fellow, it took all that I had to ask him to return my glove to me. He was five times bigger than me, and I thought that maybe I should just give him my glove if he chose not to return it to me. I began my request using “sir.” For one brief moment, I thought I heard the word “no,” but it proved to be my imagination mixed with fear that he would punch me in my other ear. He did not, and I thanked him again with “sir.”
So, there it is, my baseball career in a nutshell. Dreams of playing center field where my idol, Mickey Mantle, once played were shattered by a foul pop up. Appropriately, the ballfield where these baseball tragedies took place was called “Sheep Hill.”