I'm kneeling down behind homeplate at St. Petersburg's Al Lang Field on a perfect Sunday morning in November, waiting for our game to begin, looking out toward the dark dirt and clay of the infield, the way my father used to see it. Beyond is the green perfection of the outfield meadow. 
 I feel a sense of connection, kneeling down here behind this altar, tied to the game I spent so much of my life with and then abandoned for too long. This prayerful act binds me tightly once again to my father, to the way things were for me in the 1950s and 60s in our family. It even ties me, in a strangely relevant way, to the history of the whole nation and this child's game at its 
cultural core. 
 I don't think this is why I joined this team of players in their 40s. I joined it, I thought, to have some fun, get some exercise, run around in the sunshine a little bit. And those good things happened, of course, along with the muscle pulls and strained backs and sore arms that come with them. I didn't mean to enlist in some quixotic search for emotional ties to the national pastime. But that is where the real payoff has come for me, from the sense of connection, from the touching of something deep at the core of my life, some sense of history, of belonging. I watch my teammates throw the ball around, loosening up before this season finale. We are, as individuals, a quirky mix. 
Our player coach works for a beach resort, and there is also a health administrator, a fellow who owns his own auto repair shop, a lawyer, a nurse and a nursing administrator, a medical consultant, a drywall technician, a retired military man, a fellow who runs his own janitorial service, a self-employed mail order salesman and me, a writer and teacher. 
 It's obvious that we're very different from each other in a lot of ways, so it's the game, it's playing baseball, that draws us together, that binds us into a team. And the thing is, we're not half bad. 
The drywall man plays a fine shortstop. 
The nursing administrator is an excellent centerfielder with a cannon of an arm. 
The retired military man can play any one of five positions with equanimity and skill. 
The lawyer is a solid first baseman with several of our few extra-base hits to his credit. 
The mechanic who owns the auto repair shop is an amazingly gifted catcher for a man sneaking up on 50 years of age. 
I'm on second, and pleased with my progress on defense. Over the course of our short season I've become, I think, pretty decent with the glove. 
I watch them joke and toss the ball around, and I think they're a pretty terrific bunch and I'm glad to be part of their team, one of the Cubs, all of us out here hanging onto the joy of playing this sport as long as we can -- longer, I suppose, than we should. But I can't help thinking about the real players who've played here at Al Lang field before us, the ones who stood here in the warm sun and enjoyed the moment while watching their teammates loosen up. 
The place opened in 1947, so Musial and Mantle and Williams and Mays and Aaron and Clemente and any of several Robinsons -- all those great ones and hundreds more played in this park or its predecessor on this same spot near the harbor. From the game's Golden Age to its moneyed present, most of the players have played here at one time or another. 
And the less-than-great ones played here, too. The talented but not-so- famous. Routine players, the vast majority of big leaguers; they were the ones who just came to play, not so much for the money (especially in the old days), but for the game, just because it was what they did. They played baseball. 
        That's what my father did. He played the game. 
From 1946, after he came back from the military, to 1954, his last year as a player, Del Wilber spent eight seasons playing in a total of just 299 games, not quite two season's worth. He hit .242 lifetime, not bad for a catcher. He had a 115 RBIs, and hit 19 homeruns in his career. 
A pretty ordinary career, really, though it boggles the mind to think what kind of salary he could pull down these days. Half a million or so a year? At least. 
He played at the old Al Lang through 1949 when he was a Cardinal here for spring training, and then later visiting the park with the other teams he played for, the Phillies and the Red Sox on their spring visits. 
And I was here then, too, coming along with my brothers and sisters for spring training. Mom and Dad would haul us out of Mary, Queen of Peace school in suburban St. Louis and bring us south every spring for six weeks. Mom would teach us all morning, and then we'd spend the afternoons at the ballpark, here at Al Lang or, later, at the other fields. 
And now here I am again. On the field here for the first time in about forty years. 
The game starts. We're the home team, and so get to trot onto the field to start the game in front of the friends, wives and children that make up our fan base of perhaps, let's be generous, 40 people. We get the visitors out with no damage in their half, which is already a victory of sorts. We started poorly this season, getting thumped in the first few games, losing by scores that sounded more like football than baseball, 17-5 and 24-14 or somesuch. In several of those games the opposition scored 
six or seven in the first, though the exact details, mercifully, have blurred on me. 
But then we started to come around. Our two primary pitchers, Dave the nurse and Tom the administrator of a surgeon's group, began to throw better and better, our bats came through for us with some runs, and our defense unaccountably improved. 
And we started to win some games. At one point we were involved in a 7-6 thriller, and I made a lucky play or two at second base to help us hang on and win. That win was at the high point of the season for us, gave us a stretch of three wins in four games. 
But we faded again after that, and never did reach the .500 mark, losing a close one or two and then getting roundly thumped in the next-to-last game.  And then, glory be, a scheduling conflict kept us from our normal playing field at St. Petersburg's Busch Complex and brought us here, to Al Lang, for the finale. It is pure luck that we are here. It has nothing to do with our skill. But it still feels special, and, at least on defense, we seem to play up to what the place demands. 
As the first few innings slip by we aren't getting any hits, but we've nearly shut them down, too, just a couple of tough plays in the outfield that we couldn't quite make letting them get a couple of runs to our none. It is a sort of all-star team that we're playing. We were scheduled against a Tampa team, the Sun Devils, but they didn't have enough players and so have pulled in some talent from other teams. Good talent. We've seen this pitcher before, for instance, and lost to him. 
We tell ourselves that it doesn't matter, that winning and losing isn't really what matters at this point in our lives. The daily grind of work and commitments offers enough wins and losses on its own for most of us, we don't need a lot more of that on the playing field. 
But that doesn't mean we don't try, for it is in the trying that the satisfaction comes, the pleasure of being able to play, of fielding a tough hop in the infield or chasing down a looping liner in the outfield, of pitching and catching. 
And there's said to be pleasure in hitting, too, though in my case there hasn't been a lot of satisfaction on that score. I've only struck out once, and that's good. But first base has been hard to reach, what with my long list of easy groundballs to the infield or soft flyballs to left. Curveballs, as it turns out, are as baffling to me now as they were when I was 20. 
In the third inning I come up to the plate. This pitcher knows me, and knows I can't hit a curve, so he throws me one right away, and I swing weakly, fouling it off. He throws another, but this time I'm ready, and I see it clearly, can see the spin on the ball as it floats in, can watch it come lazily my way as I swing. I hit a ground ball, not hard but it "has eyes," as they say, and sneaks between the reach of the third baseman and the hustling shortstop. 
A basehit. I stand on first and think about it, a basehit in Al Lang field. I wonder who I share that achievement with? Who else has hit a single here? Hundreds, thousands have done it, of course. And now so have I. 
But we don't score, and then as the innings wear on the Sun Devils do, a run here, another run there. By the late innings they have managed three and we're still shutout. 
We manage a few more hits, one of them a terrific triple that takes a bounce or two and hits the wall in right center. Dave Klinger does that, and deserves a mention. It's our only hard-hit ball of the game. 
And then it's over. We can't even threaten in the bottom of the ninth, going out quietly and losing, 3-0. 
And beyond a momentary disappointment I really don't care. I made a play or 
two at second, I got a scratch basehit. The team played well, considering everything. And, most importantly, we played well here. At Al Lang. 
I drive home, shower, change, and then pick up the phone to call my father. 
When he answers I pause for a moment, trying to figure out just what to say, how to explain what this day meant to me. 
He laughs at my hesitation, asks me if I got any hits, and the connection is made.