I Connick the Terminator

Chapter 27: The Baseball

I have to tell you the story of the baseball.  When I was studying to be a priest many years ago, I was one of a handful of athletes there.  We would do different things to pass the time like basketball, football, bike polo and best of all, play stick ball in the gym.

If you have never played stick ball before, it goes like this. Minimally, you only need four people to play.  You have two people at bat and two people in the field.  We had a wooden framed strike zone behind the plate to indicate strikes.  We would use a broken shovel handle as the bat and a tennis ball to hit.

The objective of the game was to hit the ball over the tile line in the gym.  There was no defense, because the hit ball was either a home run or an out, if it did not get above the tile line.

The gymnasium at St. Joseph's Abbey in Covington, Louisiana is old.  The Monks would take batting practice in the gym many years ago.  You could tell they did this because of the steal screens/cages over the windows.

On this magical night, myself and three other seminarians were competing.  I was up to bat.  I hit a ball that went up into the cathedral pitched ceiling of the old gym.  The ball amazingly got stuck somehow on one of the pitched I-beams.  I watched in amazement as the ball began to roll down the beam miraculously balancing.  It was a tennis ball!  The ball continued to roll and balance until it came to a cross- section of the I-beam.  The ball hit the cross- section and fell to the floor.  Behind this falling tennis ball, fell a baseball, the baseball.

This baseball was smaller than today's standards and the stitching on one of the horseshoe curves of the ball was pulled away.  I could not believe what I was looking at.  I still have the baseball today located in the my trophy case.  Jesus was a baseball guy.