Wildcat strike ... three

I played for the Beckerts, back before the dinosaurs died and became oil. Had the signature red-and-blue cap. Had the signature white tee with blue piping and the snarling wildcat on the front. Had an official Ted Williams baseball glove that mostly served as a counterfeit prop.

Wildcat baseball, where Everybody Makes The Team. It does take a body back.

Takes me to McMillen Park, to left field, to a lot of standing around observing nature in those mid-1960s summers. Miles away, at the plate, tiny batters swung and missed. I was so far from the action I couldn't even chirp "Heyyyy, battah, battah," which proved our coach was an astute man who knew how to strategically place his troops.

See, I was never really a baseball player. I got walked a few times. Once I stuck out my bat just so it would look like I wasn't dead, and accidentally made contact.

Single to right.

OK. So almost to right.

And yet ...

And yet, I think of my boyhood summers now, and Wildcat baseball bubbles right up. The heat. The dirt. Opening my glove one miraculous morning, and finding the baseball there.

And so I opened up the Journal Gazette this morning and saw they were calling off Wildcat baseball this summer, and I felt a pang. It's not like I didn't know it was coming, of course. The bastard plague has taken everything else, after all. No way Wildcat would be spared.

"You try to think of some alternative, and there isn't any," League President Bill Derbyshire said.

"We're in wholly, wholly unfamiliar ground. We have dealt with floods, and heat, and bugs and bees, one thing after another, but nothing like this."

Nothing like this for all of us, truth be known. For Wildcat, it will mark the first time in the organization's 59-year history there will be no season. No blue-and-red caps. No white shirts with blue piping. No "Heyyy, battah, battah," no Beckerts or Fords or Mantles or car names.

That is how Wildcat's always done it, see. Either your Kitty team was named for a major-league player -- the Beckerts, of course, being named for Cubs second baseman Glenn Beckert -- or your Kat team was the Thunderbirds or Plymouths or Dodges.

Some leagues in some locations were named for candy bars. Some had animal names. Some even had NFL team names. All of them taught kids the summer American game, and left them with enduring summer memories.

Next year, surely, that will happen again. I'll stroll past the two Wildcat diamonds over by Arlington Park Elementary, and parents will be lined up in their lawn chairs and kids in caps and shirts will swing and miss and occasionally connect. "Heyyyy, battah, battah" will rise into the blue air again, the anthem of our summer mornings for six decades.

But this year, as with so much else, the diamonds will be empty and the anthem stilled. And something will go out of my morning walks.

Heyyyy, COVID-19, COVID-19. Up yours.