A spindly-legged string bean, I stand in the batter’s box and the count is full. My local automotive-shop-sponsored team uniform is cheap and ill-fitting; my polyester shorts are scratchy and riding up; my red mesh hat is boxy and unbroken. I look to the third base coach, my dad, for direction. Counting on the wild inaccuracy of most fifth-grade pitchers, he tells me to take one. 

I take a massive swing at a pitch high and outside for strike three. 

As we walk to the dugout, Dad looks confused and I look embarrassed. I hate disappointing him (still do).

“What happened? I thought I told you to take one?”

“I did take one! I took a huge swing!”

“What? No, take one means take a pitch. Don’t swing. Make the pitcher throw a strike!”

“How was I supposed to know that??”

After ten years of baseball in the background of our lives, I’d somehow missed this jargon. I didn’t yet know our family’s unspoken philosophy: take one – and then swing away.

***

Twice divorced, Grandma Doris lived alone my entire life. She didn’t go to church, but she knew devotion, and her devotion was to the Cincinnati Reds. 

At Grandma’s house: National Geographics on her built-ins, an electronic organ in her living room, an adding machine in her office, gems in her jewelry box, a bar in her basement. Wall-to-wall carpet and air conditioning and the kind of mid-century modern furniture we die for today. 

Marty (Brennaman) and Joe (Nuxhall) on the radio. 

She was a full count of delicious contradictions. Impeccably dressed, hair done, red lipstick, compact at the ready, she smoked Virginia Slims and had the raspiest voice I’d ever heard and the most liberated cacophonous cackle of a laugh – one that just did not square with such an otherwise refined image (I inherited the same cackle). These ostentations annoyed my mother, but they fascinated me. Only now as an adult woman do I understand why I watched Grandma so carefully, with such curiosity. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was my coach too.

Doris Burton knew how to take a pitch.

Some coaches would describe taking a pitch simply as deliberate inaction.

Take one too often, and you become passive. Hesitant. Inert.

Some coaches would describe taking a pitch as a smart, patient strategy. Taking a pitch means you’re willing to watch and wait. It means you know how to size up the pitcher. You know how to anticipate. You play the odds. And you take your swing when the time is right. 

In 1945, Grandma’s big brother Dee was killed by a sniper on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, six weeks before the war ended. She watched the war reports. She waited for him to come home. He didn’t.

In early 1953, Grandma and her first husband divorced; my dad was twelve and my aunt was ten. Grandpa moved to Michigan to work for the Detroit Free Press. Over the holidays that year, Dad took a Greyhound bus north to spend a few days with him. They went to the Lions game against the Browns; my 80-year-old father still remembers the score was 17-16 Lions. After that visit, no one heard from Grandpa again for twenty-five years. She watched; she waited – for contact, for child support. Neither came.

In 1958, she married again and divorced five years later. 

In my mind, I can hear her saying, “Well, enough of all that!” She started taking her swings.

By the year 1980, when I was five, she had been working as a bookkeeper and office manager for 30 years. She had been flying solo for nearly 20 of those years, and it seemed pretty glamorous to me. This woman owned her own home, took care of business, rarely suffered fools, and did what she damn well pleased, even if it didn’t square with traditional notions of femininity. I knew her only in her Swing Away years, and this gave me a deep understanding of what it meant to live joyfully as an independent woman.

She bowled regularly with her girlfriends and was the commissioner of several local leagues. In 1985, she was inducted to the Springfield-Clark County Ohio US Bowling Congress Hall of Fame. 

Once she retired, she made the 90-minute drive down to Cincinnati for home games seven to ten times a season. Always by herself: beer, score card, sunshine, Ohio River just on the horizon.

She joined the Rosie Reds – Rooters Organized to Stimulate Interest and Enthusiasm in the Cincinnati Reds – a philanthropic and social organization that supports youth and college baseball in the city. 

We went to Reds games together as a family – Dad, Mom, Grandma, and I – where there were non-negotiable traditions: you took your glove, you paid attention, you scored the game. When I chose my favorite player, Grandma and Dad both approved; Eric Davis was in the 40-40 club. I came home with a poster, added a huge wad of chewing gum to my batting practice ritual, and started swinging indiscriminately at every ball that came my way.

On special occasions, I was allowed to spend the night at Grandma’s. She let me play with everything at her house – the adding machine, the costume jewelry, the organ. In the summer, I ran around outside or swam in the neighbor’s pool. When we came back to the house and I was crispy from the chlorine and the sun, we stepped down into the cool, dark basement. I stared at all the Cincinnati Reds memorabilia on the walls behind the bar—heavy on Tony Perez, her favorite player—while Grandma made me a plate of cold fried chicken and potato chips. She always let me have a small juice glass of beer with my late lunch, and forty years later, this is still my favorite summer afternoon meal.

***

Playing softball taught me the importance of finding my fit: I wasn’t fast and I didn’t have much of an arm. I was too skinny to throw with any kind of velocity, but I was consistent and reliable. I was a decent second baseman; I could make the stops, and I always knew where my first and second plays were. As I grew taller and slower, a better fit emerged: I had long arms and legs and could stretch from the first-base bag like a champ. 

In the batter’s box, I figured out that skinny didn’t matter; it was all about timing. I was patient, and I could wait for my pitch. 

I’ve taken a pitch or two since: jobs and partners and cities that weren’t quite right. 

And then I swung away—and connected with a life I’d always imagined. I’m a writer and educator flying solo in a quirky little Ohio town full of other artists. I have lovely neighbors and even better friends. At my house: books on my built-ins, paintings and collages and rough drafts in my studio, a make-shift bar on my back patio. 

And until he retired last year, Marty on the radio.

From March to September, if it’s not raining, I’m working out in the yard or the garden, the Reds on an old transistor radio I bought at a brick-and-mortar RadioShack. On free summer afternoons, I’ll drive down to Cincinnati for a day game. One colleague became a best friend when we discovered a shared love of baseball. The first Mother’s Day after my mom died, she and her wife went to the game with Dad and me. Five years later, he said that was one of his favorite days at the ballpark, and for Christmas, he gave me three front-row-seats-down-the-first-base-line tickets: one for me, one for my friend, one for her wife. “Make sure you tell them how much I enjoyed that game together,” he said.

Every year on Grandma’s birthday, March 27, I renew my Rosie Reds membership. I dress up for the day, no matter what’s on my agenda. I download the season schedule and write all the day games and home series on my summer calendar; I highlight away games that have the best road trip potential—priority on parks I haven’t yet visited. I listen to a spring training game on the trusty transistor, and I have cold fried chicken and beer for dinner.

ERIN HILL is a writer, educator, and Reds fan living in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Pro: seven-inning double header. Anti: universal designated hitter.