When You're A Jet
This marks one year of my Friday yabba-dabba-doo. Whoa, Jackson!
To start this one on an upbeat note, Holyoke Youth Baseball will have kids back on the field in May after cancelling all of last season. Hopefully a sign that we’re rounding third and headed for home.
The agency is a longtime sponsor of the Elmwood Jets, my old team in the Mitey-Mite league in Holyoke. The Jets began as a bunch of jimmy-crack-corn 7-year-olds who were cut from other teams. Good old Buddy O’Neill couldn’t accept that a kid would be cut from their first baseball team.
Unlike every other team in the league, we had no sponsor. Our parents chipped in ten bucks and for that we got a cheeseball mesh hat with a stick-on J and our moms had to iron J-E-T-S letters on a ragbag T-shirt. Some of the lettering was crooked because the ironing job wasn’t too good. We got the name because jets from Westover used to fly over Buddy’s house in Elmwood. For a bunch of castoffs, the Jets went on to win the Mitey-Mite Championship ten out of twelve years. A league record that stands to this day.
When I started the business, one thing I wanted to do was bring back the old neighborhood team. And I did. But I gotta admit that, to this day, what really threw me a knuckleball, a screwball and a cornball was that Mitey-Mite is now a goddamn tee-ball league. My reaction then was, “Oh lord, take me now.” The only thing that belongs on a tee is a golf ball, Jack. Back when we took the field, we didn’t use no tee, Tommy. In fact, I was the number-three pitcher for the Jets. Until the night I walked thirteen straight batters and was shipped out to left field. A couple years ago, I did a video giving my two cents on tee-ball. Give it a watch.
What’s neat about this coming season is Gainer’s son Shane will be wearing an Elmwood Jets uniform. (By the way Gainer, who never played for the Jets, hit 40 on April Fools’ Day. No joking.) Shane O’ will be the first family member in the Jets line-up since I played. I’m proud of the kid. And as the Jet song from West Side Story goes, “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dyin’ day.” Keep your dukes up.