Dial It Down
It was a warm summer day, before cell phones took over the universe, and my little brother and I were playing a game of home run derby in the backyard of our childhood home in Malvern, PA. I was about 13 years old, he was about 10. He was an athlete (and still is an athlete), I...well I just wandered around on little league fields (I’ve stopped wandering around...well at least on baseball diamonds). But this day there weren’t any scoreboards...or umpires just two brothers having fun pitching tennis balls at a cut off hockey stick trying to hit them into our neighbors pool (over the years we tried to hit lots of items in their pool...but I’ll save the story of “Pete Sampras mad at his neighbors” for another occasion). Home run derby was our favorite summer game - we played it often and we had a dirt spot in my father’s otherwise pristinely manicured lawn to prove it. We would always stand in the same place to hit baseballs. We played it so often that we wore out the grass down to t