For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women (or any of Terry Heggy's other writing), please visit http://www.shyperson.com/.

Way back before Kevin Costner built his first cornfield ballpark, us kids who lived in Kansas tended to become fans of the baseball team that received the most radio coverage. This was before the KC Royals came into existence, and WAY before the advent of the Colorado Rockies, so there was no shame or stigma in rooting for a team from another state. It seemed that the media granted the most coverage to the Yankees and the Dodgers, so most of us picked one or the other to become the object of our fandom. I don't remember for sure, but I suppose I formed my opinions based on how my dad felt about the subject. Nevertheless, whether it was my dad's opinion or not, I remember having the distinct impression that the Yankees were good and the Dodgers were evil. It was also OK to root for the Giants, because Willie Mays was on their team, and he was great. (I'm pretty sure that I thought he played every position on their team.)

Anyway, I was a Yankees fan. We listened to games on the radio. Mickey Mantle became my baseball hero, followed closely by Roger Maris. Their pictures made it into the newspaper, so we knew what they looked like, but we had to create mental images of the other players. I assumed that Whitey Ford was an albino, naturally, and that Yogi Berra wore a necktie and was smarter than the av-er-age Berra. During the season of the Great Home Run Record chase, my friends and I all followed the season with great interest.

Maris got the record, of course, and it became the dream of every neighborhood kid to be the one to break Roger's Record.

After the season, one of the breakfast food companies started printing baseball cards on the backs of their cereal boxes. We ate a LOT of cold cereal that year, and I ended up with several Maris and Mantle cards, complete with those mind-boggling home run statistics. (Of course, the back of the card was the featureless grey cardboard that inhabits the inside of all cereal boxes, but they were still better than the bubble gum cards because a) we got them for free, and b) we didn't have to deal with that crappy bubble gum that was usually so hard it would shatter into bright pink artery-severing shards. -- OK, they weren't really free, but our parents paid for the cereal, which amounted to the same thing in my fiscally limited world.)

Those cards became the inspiration for a noble quest; my brother and I decided that we would spend the summer trying to break Roger's Record.

Even as grade-school Kansas boys, we were sophisticated enough to realize that we weren't going to have a shot at it if we used the same parameters as the big leagues. We were much shorter than Mr. Maris, for one thing, we didn't have access to a major league ballpark or major league pitching...and there were compelling reasons not to use a hardball. Our "backstop" consisted of backyard fence made from 1 x 4 redwood slats, which would shatter if hit by a "real" baseball. And besides, none of us really wanted to deal with hardballs -- they hurt if you got hit by one. Tennis balls were easier to see, easier to hit, and if we lost them, we could probably find a few extras embedded in the bushes surrounding one of the local tennis courts.

For the pitchers "mound", we used a spot parallel to the concrete step leading to the back door of our house. (That step also served as first base, on those occasions where we got enough kids together to actually play a game. Usually it was just me and my brother, and maybe one other kid.) The outfield ended at the Dotzour's fence -- anything that went over that fence was considered a homer.

My brother had actually played some little league ball, and had considerably more advance baseball skills than I -- but I was two years older, which left us on more-or-less equal footing for our home run derby. (Herbert the Pervert and some of the other neighborhood kids also kept a tally, but since they didn't live at our house, they got considerably fewer at-bats.)

We'd take turns pitching to each other. Each batter would be allowed 3 outs, and then we'd switch. Since we had no fielders, judging outs became a matter of the honor system. Strike-outs were obvious, of course, but for any wimpy grounders or lofty pop flies, we generally had no trouble agreeing on whether or not our imaginary fielders would have gotten to it. We'd also switch as soon as somebody popped one over the fence.

Home runs were a mixed blessing. Certainly we became excited at adding to our season HR total, but the problem was the reason the Dotzours had a fence. They had a dog in their back yard. The dog seemed to be pretty well-mannered, but we were never absolutely sure that our next trip through their gate wouldn't be the one that triggered a Cujo response. If we were pretty sure no one was home at the Dotzour's house, we'd just jump over the fence, which cut down the time in-yard, and greatly enhanced our chances of slipping past the dog's awareness.

The summer proceeded beautifully. We played ball on a regular basis, but there were many other things to do. We spent an awful lot of time at the Harvest Park swimming pool, catching rays and irritating the lifeguards. We took bike rides into the uncharted and undeveloped subdivisions springing up around our neighborhood. We played "kick the can" with the neighborhood gang, caught crawdads in the creek, and dug holes in the vacant lot behind Kenny Zeh's house. The home run lead changed hands several times, but as the summer wound down, we realized that we were going to have to really buckle down to break the record before school started.

I really don't remember what happened, but nobody broke the record. Perhaps we lost interest, perhaps we were unable to schedule enough ballplaying time. Perhaps we just weren't very good long ball hitters. There could be many reasons, but I think I'll stick with blaming my brother for not giving me enough good pitches to hit. Yeah, that's it; not enough good pitching.

Still, the summer was not without its accomplishments. We did manage to kill all of the grass around our home plate area. We broke at least one window, lost several balls to the infamous "ball-eating bush", and probably drove the Dotzour's dog into early senility by interrupting his naptime. And even though we used tennis balls for our quest, we missed enough pitches that the cumulative impacts ended up breaking the slats of the redwood fence anyway.

I suppose it could be argued that we failed from lack of focus -- we didn't stick to our process with enough fortitude to achieve the goal. It could also be argued that our quest was merely an exercise in fun for a couple of silly little kids trying to emulate their sports heroes. But I don't think either of those viewpoints applies. You see, neither my brother nor myself has forgotten the pursuit of that record. We're both quite a bit older now than Maris was when he set it, and I suppose you'd have to update the target to include Bonds, anyway -- but we still haven't given up. We haven't failed yet, because we aren't dead yet. Someday... maybe this summer, maybe the next...we're going to break that record.

No, we can't do it in the backyard of the old house in Wichita; we no longer own it. And besides, there's an extra fence there now that would be in the way. The redwood backstop is long gone, and the home's latest owner has planted a petunia bed where home plate should be. But not too long ago, we stopped by the old neighborhood and measured the distance to the fence, as well as the height of the fence. When the time is right, we'll re-create the conditions we need for this challenge, and we'll go out and get the job done. We'll tip our hats to Mickey and Willie and Whitey and Roger, and we'll get the job done.

---------Addendum----------
During a trip to visit my dad in Wichita, I drove by the old neighborhood and took a look at the dimensions of our old "field" (ie, I stepped off how far it was from our "home plate" to the Dotzour's fence. It was a rough estimate, since other people live in those houses now and I didn't want to go into their back yards, but I was probably within a handful of yards.

Then one afternoon, Pat and I went over to a local ballfield and measured off that same distance. Then, adding on another dozen feet or so to reflect the distance the ball would have to travel to clear the imaginary fence, we laid out a rope in a semi-circle at the appropriate distance in the outfield. We concluded that if we hit a fly ball and it landed on the far side of the rope (low line drives wouldn't count), it would be equivalent to blasting the ball into the Dotzour's yard. Anything that didn't make it would count as an out. We would take turns pitching to each other, and switching batters after 10 outs had been made. We allocated the entire afternoon and evening to the project, hoping that we might be able to hit 62 or more in a single day.

Turns out it was a piece of cake! We were knocking round-trippers on every third or fourth swing. I started strong, building up a bit of a lead, but Pat finished first. By the time we quit, barely over an hour later, we had each broken Bonds' record, and had left Mantle and Maris in the dust.

So why were we SO much more efficient as adults than we had been as kids? Good question. It was a combination of factors: we both were just bigger, stronger, and more coordinated, thanks to years of weight lifting and sports participation. We were both better pitchers, and thus gave the batter a much better chance of hitting a dinger. Maybe the bats were better or the balls bouncier. But mostly, I think it was just confidence; after playing on real fields for years and years after our summer record chase activities, the distance we had to hit just didn't seem all that far. We expected to mash the ball, to crush each and every pitch. And we did. It was a most satisfying day.

(But wait...I'm not sure we factored in the altitude. I wonder if the thinner Colorado air made the balls fly farther? Oh man, that's gonna haunt me. I think we're gonna have to do it all over again. Sigh.)