My wife stared at the sign with the same expression that she might wear while watching 7,000-pound hippos dance the twist on their two back feet.
“I don’t get that at all,” she said while pointing to the sign. “You’re going to have to explain what that means.”
I could understand her perplexity. The sign, hanging on a fence outlining a baseball field, read: “Peppering Fence Prohibited.”
We were walking around the HI Corbett Stadium complex in Tucson’s Reid Park. The stadium is the home of the University of Arizona’s baseball team and once was the spring training site for the Cleveland Indians and Colorado Rockies.
I had already shared these baseball bits with my wife without her acknowledgment. But then she saw the sign and her interest in baseball suddenly piqued — or at least the part about the pepper being banned from the ballpark.
“Why would you pepper a fence?” she asked. “And what about salt? Is that banned, too?”
Some of you might be as clueless as my wife about the sign. Some of you — especially if you played baseball at some point in your life — know what it means. And some of you who actually think that football is the national pastime probably don’t care to know.
It’s all about a game called pepper — a game once played by Little Leaguers and Major Leaguers and all the players in between.
I’ll let Wikipedia explain it:
Pepper is a common pre-game exercise in which one player hits brisk grounders and line drives to a group of fielders who are standing about twenty feet away. The fielders throw balls to the batter, who uses a short, light swing to hit the ball on the ground towards the fielders. The fielders field the ground balls and continue tossing the ball to the batter. This exercise keeps the fielders and batter alert, and helps to develop quickness and good hand-eye coordination.
And often, the batter uses a fence or a wall in front of the stands as a backstop in case he hits a foul or if the ball gets by him.
I remember playing it as a kid and how fun it could be with five or six guys working on both their skills and a little baseball bonding. If you were a fielder, you were standing in a line with a bunch of teammates and usually yucking it up while still being competitive with one another.
Unfortunately (at least in my opinion), pepper has been banned around a lot of fields because of the fear of bystanders getting hurt from foul balls. Many groundskeepers also hate the game because the constant shuffling of the players in one spot can supposedly tear up a section of the playing field.
Thus the signs. “No pepper” or “peppering the fence prohibited.”
So you rarely see pepper played anymore. And besides, the Major League warmup routines have become so specialized that players don’t have the opportunity to indulge in what probably looks like too much fun to managers and coaches.
Yep, pepper is all but gone — sniff, sniff, achoo!
I explained this all to my wife and then I told her how pepper provided me with some pleasant childhood memories — and that I mourned its passing. All she said in return was, “Baseball is a strange game. Pepper sounds even stranger.”
If only I could have countered with one of Plato’s sayings: “Pepper is small in quantity and great in virtue.”
Contact Bill at [email protected]