This year my son was painfully shy, always remaining silently apart from his baseball teammates. We had just moved to town, and he was one of the few 7th graders on a team of big 8th graders, so he was afflicted with acute self-consciousness.
To my surprise, though, he chose # 42 for his jersey, the same number that Jackie Robinson wore for the Brooklyn Dodgers. All the other kids had numbers in the low teens or single digits, but my son was out there taking a stand every day, wearing # 42 on his back.
When I asked him why he chose # 42, he said, "Because Jackie Robinson was one of the fastest players, ever." So that explained it. I had thought maybe he chose # 42 because we had watched Field of Dreams over and over, and he had been influenced by Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones), his favorite character, who had a dream of getting to see Jackie Robinson play at Ebbets Field. Or maybe he was influenced by the books we had read together about Jackie Robinson "breaking the color barrier." But no--it was Jackie's speed. No matter what kind of batting slump my son might have been going through (and anything short of a base hit was a slump, in his eyes), he had always been one of the fastest kids on his Little League teams, and nobody could take that away.
This new team needed my son's speed, so he mostly played center field--out there by himself, on the fringes of baseball's social imaginary. If the pitcher and catcher symbolize downtown, the heart of the action, the infield is the suburbs, and the outfield is the land of abandon.
Seeing that # 42 on my son's back as he trotted out to center field killed me every time.
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