On the Wednesday before the championship, two men in red work shirts walked into my dugout, picked up the jersey bin, and carried fourteen baseball uniforms out to a white pickup truck while thirteen eleven-year-old boys stood in the dirt and watched them go.
Nobody said a word. That was the part I could not get over later. Thirteen boys, and you could hear the sprinkler ticking on the far field.
I am Dell Ostrander, I am forty-seven years old, and I have coached the Cedar Grove Cardinals in the Shalesburg church league for six summers. It was a quarter after four on a hot June afternoon, the sun still high over Veterans Park, and I was standing at the end of the dugout with a clipboard in my hand and absolutely nothing to say.
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The man who sent them was not there. He did not need to be. His name was on the side of the truck: Tobias Tire and Auto, Mill Street. His name was on the front of the bin, on the back of every jersey inside it, on the banner on our outfield fence, and on the check that had paid for most of what these boys had ever worn on a ball field.
One of the men, Walt, would not look at me. He had been changing my oil for nine years. He set the bin in the truck bed like it was full of eggs and said, very quietly, “Dell, I’m sorry. He told me to.”
“I know it,” I said. “Go on.”
Then a bat bag went into the truck, and two catcher’s sets, and the good helmets, and the white ball bucket. A boy named Wyatt, who had been warming up at the fence, took off the cap he was wearing, looked at the red T on the front of it, and handed it to Walt without being asked.
I have never been angrier at a grown man in my life. And I have never been so sure that the Lord was standing somewhere close by, waiting to see what I would do with it.
I should say first that Tobias was not always the man in that truck. For six years he was the best thing that ever happened to our league. He is sixty-four, he sits in the third pew at Cedar Grove Baptist, and when our old sponsor, the feed store, went under, he walked up to me after church and asked what it cost to keep these boys in uniforms. I told him. The check came Monday, and every spring after that, he paid: jerseys, caps, umpire fees, trophies. He was at every opening day with a folding chair and a thermos. He wasn’t a monster. He was a man who had gotten used to being thanked.
We are not a fancy team. The Cardinals are whoever shows up: farm boys, a preacher’s son, two brothers whose dad drives a log truck, a boy whose mother cleans the school. Before every game, I do the same thing. I pull the boys in on the grass behind home plate, all of us with a hand in the middle, and I say the same short prayer my own coach said when I was eleven. “Lord, thank You for the day, the dirt, and each other. Let every boy leave this field knowing he was seen. Amen.” And they say “Amen, Cardinals,” because a boy has to have something to shout.