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True tales from a 59-year-old pitching ace

OK, so maybe it was in a rec league, and maybe I wasn’t exactly an ace, but still . . .

Dina Rudick/Globe Staff

Last summer my baseball team beat the Framingham Orioles in the first game of a doubleheader at Ashland Middle School. The Orioles were the perennially dominant team of the MetroWest ABL, a recreational baseball league composed of players 28 and older, so this was a big deal.

Any victory over the O’s tends to make noise around the league. But this win was especially sweet for our team, the Ashland Red Sox, a .500 ball club that hadn’t beaten the Orioles in years.

Damn, I said to myself.

I was slated to pitch the second game.

Having survived 16 seasons in the league, I knew what to expect when you get the Orioles riled up. When it came to sluggers, the O’s never had to rebuild — just reload. You couldn’t hold them down for long. They were the main reason the league had written a mercy rule into its books.

Ashland hung in there for the first few frames of the nightcap. Framingham scored two runs, but then Ashland scored two right back. In the fourth inning, the Oriole cleanup hitter knocked in two more with a long double. Trying to stretch it into a triple, he beat the throw but tore up his knee, rolling off the bag in pain. Someone called 911.

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As the injured Oriole lay stretched in the dirt waiting for the ambulance, players from both teams gathered in a circle about him, chatting amiably, if somewhat incongruously.

One of the Orioles complimented me on losing weight.

“How do you do it?” he asked.

I started to answer, but something told me he wasn’t just referring to my getting in shape. He meant me still playing at my advanced age. I was 59.

“Well, I cut down on soda,” I offered lamely.

We moved on to other topics. The ambulance came and went, but I kept thinking about better answers.

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Exercise? Regular sleep? Dedication to the game? Avoidance of methamphetamines?

I couldn’t say.

Play resumed. I took the hill again. The home-plate umpire turned to both benches and made a point of saying, “Two out!” Apparently the injured runner had not called time before deciding to roll around in excruciating pain and our third baseman had tagged him. The Oriole bench erupted in protest.

“Now they’re really mad,” my catcher whispered with a smile. He slapped the ball in my glove and headed back behind the plate.

I soon found myself in trouble. Two on, two outs, a good hitter up. I gained two quick strikes on long foul balls, but my “out” pitch, a split-finger, had gone south after an elbow injury a couple years earlier. I summoned the catcher to the mound again.

“Be ready.”

He nodded solemnly and walked back. I took a deep breath and threw the ball.

Steve Saraceno and the rest of the 2014 Ashland Red Sox.Steve Saraceno

The O’s third-base coach later told me he thought I was just lobbing the ball to the catcher in order to get a new one from the ump. Perhaps the batter did, too. At any rate, he froze, and our catcher leaned forward and caught the high-arcing ball, slow-pitch style, glove up as if soliciting a donation.

“Strike three!”

Insult added to injury, the Oriole bench erupted again, even louder this time. “I’ve been umping for over thirty years,” the arbiter later told me with a wicked grin, “and that was the first eephus pitch I ever had the chance to call a strike.”

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In this manner the Ashland Red Sox reached the game’s seventh and ostensibly final frame down just a run at 5-4. We were losing, and yet I felt totally satisfied.

There are few things in life like pitching a decent ballgame when you’re almost 60. Some of the other players were young enough to be my sons. So what if I took the loss? At least I could say I went the distance.

Then, to my surprise and — it can be admitted here — to my chagrin, our catcher stroked a two-strike two-out single to knock in two runs and put us ahead by one.

I had to trudge out to the mound for the last of the seventh.

As I grabbed my glove, another pitcher on our team, Dan Tessier, a mere puppy of 34, called everyone together. “OK, bear down now,” Tessier implored. “We only need three outs. All together — SOX!”

With that roar reverberating in my ears, I sprinted to the mound, took my warm-ups with ever-increasing vigor, swept my foot across the rubber, nodded firmly at the sign from the catcher, and threw a gopher pitch.

Our right fielder just stood there slack-jawed. The home run landed well beyond the right center-field fence, just a few feet from where my Camry stood parked. Some people said it was the longest ball they had ever seen hit at the field, which has been around since disco reigned.

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Upon returning to our bench at the end of the inning, I encountered a stone-faced assembly. But I kept my chin up. “I think I deserve credit for throwing a pitch hard enough for a batter to hit it that far,” I said righteously.

They didn’t even bother to smirk. “Did it come down yet?” one teammate asked. Another said, “I wish it hit your car.”

It was then that the Framingham player’s question returned to mind. “How do you do it?” he’d asked. Well, Junior, I said to myself, you do it this way: Laugh, and keep playing.

The Orioles had only tied the game. In our half of the inning we scratched out a run, and despite some dramatics on my part in the bottom of the eighth, the run held up. The Ashland Red Sox had beaten the mighty Framingham Orioles in extra innings.

It was something I always wanted to do. At least before I turned 60.

But now the Orioles are really mad.


Steve Saraceno is a writer and filmmaker in Ashland. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.