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The field I see is some peewee-league diamond in dusty old Oklahoma. Night games were the exciting ones. The lights would kick on, and the way the field was lit up was just so aesthetically pleasing, even though I wouldn’t have known how to articulate that at the time.
Baseball was my whole life as a kid. It was the zeitgeist sport then. The Ken Griffey Jr. era, The Sandlot on repeat, my dad always in the garage with a Braves game on the radio. Every kid on my block played. I’d get home from school, and we’d put together games in backyards, or just go play catch.
I was always a pitcher, until I quit. It’s funny, because it’s a team sport, but being the pitcher is kind of like a solo sport: You’re out there on this tiny little island by yourself. When you’re doing good, everyone loves you, and when you’re not doing good, you’re like, “Everyone hates me.”
Seventh grade was the year I started guitar lessons, and I just became obsessed. Suddenly I could play Green Day songs, and maybe switch these chords around, write my own. Around the same time, at practice, I stole a base in kind of a reckless way, got thrown out, and the head coach freaked out on me. It’s this moment in my young brain: This 45-year-old guy is screaming at me. I’m gonna go play guitar. No one screams at me when I play that thing. (Over the years, this ended up not being the case.)
I left baseball on the side of the road, really didn’t think about it at all. Walking to the third bar of the night in Brooklyn, I’d catch a glimpse of an unused ball field or some softball game in McCarren Park and get this feeling that I missed the way you sweat playing a game with your friends, and then how good water feels. But in your 20s, you’re so concerned with being cool or something. My life is rock and roll.
Then the Royals went to the World Series two years in a row and won the second one, and it completely sucked me back in. By then, I was meeting other musicians who also loved baseball, and you’re sort of relearning: It’s OK to love sports.
Then my friend Sean, who plays legit hardball in a league in San Francisco, invited me out on a day off. I just put on running shoes and went. And I picked it right back up. I got a hit. I had a diving catch in the outfield. I was like, “Dude, this is fucking awesome.”
I don’t think I’ve ever met any resistance to this stuff, which has kind of surprised me: If you ask someone to play catch, they almost always say yes. It’s like everyone still has some version of this in them. Baseball can be an intense sport, but it’s also basically hanging out and drinking beer.
My favorite game is one in Austin at the Long Time—a sandlot baseball field that’s a real Field of Dreams scenario. The first year they put me on a team called the Playboys. Now I field my own team of friends and musicians, and there are little kids there, dogs wandering around, families, music during the seventh-inning stretch. It’s like a big picnic.
Last time, I pitched two innings. We scored five runs in the first, and I was like, “Oh, we’re gonna crush these guys”—and then I gave up seven, and there’s a part of me, this little kid, that’s scared everyone’s gonna be mad at him. The next inning was three up, three down. Which is maybe not too unlike fronting a band: It’s kind of up to me, and if it goes bad, maybe that’s my fault, but if it goes great, that’s also on me.
Playing in your mid-30s, half the time I’m out there hoping I’m not gonna tweak something. My bandmate Liam put it best: You really do only get one body. But when you’re chasing a ball, your mind has no time to think about much else. It’s the same when I have a baseball in my hand as when I have a guitar in my hand—there’s some peace that comes with that. Nothing else to worry about in that moment except performing as best as I know how. — Kevin Morby, as told to Jesse Will
Kevin Morby’s latest album, Little Wide Open, is available now.