Not everyone dreams big dreams.
Heck, not everyone dreams sensible dreams.. When my friend Mick was in his late teens and people would ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he had a one-word answer.
“Pregnant.”
And this was seven years before Joan Rivers came out with her movie “Rabbit Test,” starring Billy Crystal as the world’s first pregnant man.
Of course my friend was joking and he actually did have real dreams. Big ones too.
Like millions of other American boys coming of age in the ’50s and ’60s, he wanted to play major league baseball. For the Yankees. In center field.
A million to one shot, right?
He was actually good enough that he had a toe in the door, although he didn’t know it. In the summer of 1971, after he graduated from high school, he told me the Baltimore Orioles offered him the chance to go to southwestern Virginia and play schort-season rookie league ball.
Sadly, he had no one explain to him what it all meant. He was scheduled to start college that September, and his father wasn’t excited about baseball getting in the way and he didn’t want to disappoint his dad. He told the scout he would sign only if it was a Double-A contract.
The scout thanked him for his time and never came back.
Twenty years later, Mick and I were talking about it. By that point, I had covered eight different seasons of minor league baseball from coast to coast. I pointed out that there were five different levels of minor-league ball — rookie, low A, high A, double A and triple A. The biggest jump was from high A to double A, and that was when they first started seeing a player as someone who might go all the way.
In rookie ball, something like 90 percent of the players were just there to fill out the lineups so that the few prospects could play games.
What the Orioles had been offering him was the chance to play some games and maybe catch their attention.
So that dream disappeared and my friend went on with his life.
My friend’s story is sort of sad.
Mine is even worse.
I never really settled on a dream, and I had small amounts of success at numerous things. I spent 16 years as a sportswriter, but never got more than a taste of the big time. I was a newspaper columnist for five years ony to have it taken away by a mediocre editor to didn’t appreciate my work.
Maybe the biggest concrete dream I ever had was getting a novel published, and I did that twice in my 70s. I don’t think either one has reached a hundred copies in sales yet.
So what’s the microphone? The memory of a wonderful night in 2001 when at age 51 I had the chance to stand up in front of an audience on an open mic night and do a five-minute comedy routine. I wasn’t great, but I was far from the worst and in fact pretty good.
With a wife and kids and well into middle age, it was way too late to pursue it, but I know one thing.
That night was my Baltimore Orioles scout.