Gary Lloyd
A decade ago, I’d be at a couple baseball games a week.
I would bring two printed rosters, a three-subject college-ruled notebook, three black-ink pens, a tape recorder and Lord knows what else. I remember freezing to a Gardendale High School bleacher at a doubleheader in April 2014, sweltering in a duck-blind of a press box at Pinson Valley High School and withstanding a thrown cap to the back of the neck from a fan who didn’t even have a son on the team.
As a full-time reporter who covered it all — Monday school board meetings, Tuesday city council meetings, Wednesday business stories, Thursday crime — pulling up a press box chair or sliding onto a cold bleacher seat felt like a one-night vacation.
Now that I infrequently freelance, I make it to fewer high school baseball games. Maybe one per year, if that. This February, I trekked to Briarwood Christian School to see Hewitt-Trussville High School take on the Lions in search of head coach Jeff Mauldin’s 700th career win. Naturally and predictably, my attendance jinxed him. Briarwood, no stranger to great baseball, won. Superstitions in baseball? Who knew?
But that night, there to cover something that would have happened after the seven innings finished, I spent the game scribbling some observations, fewer stats and generally keeping my notebook closed. I watched a man salute, statue-still, during the National Anthem. A Briarwood student, somehow appearing unfazed by the nerves that come with it, sang that Anthem beautifully. I watched Hewitt-Trussville’s Grayson Pope, injured in June 2023 during a thunderstorm, shake hands and chat with Briarwood head coach Steve Renfroe. A woman, maybe a parent or teacher, sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
Despite my reason for attending the game not coming to fruition, it was worthwhile. I took a photo of a dipping sun over a Briarwood player taking swings in the batting cage, and while I am no photographer, I am proud of it. I got to catch up with a few folks I hadn’t seen in a while. I got to watch baseball without the stress of painstakingly keeping statistics and constantly tweeting updates. I didn’t get hit in the back of the neck by a flung cap.
The game was sloppy yet competitive, slow yet compelling. Briarwood won, 7-6. Sidebar: Why must we speed up baseball games at the Major League level? Why do you want to go home sooner? Have you watched baseball? I want more, not less.
Anyway, neither the Lions nor Huskies quit on that game in February. The game truly meant nothing for playoff positioning — it was only Hewitt-Trussville’s seventh game of the 2024 season, and the programs compete in different classifications — and Hewitt-Trussville subsequently reeled off six straight wins and proved victorious in 12 of its next 13 games without me staring down from a top bleacher seat. I suppose Coach Mauldin prefers I stay home. Those superstitions, you know?
Now that I can finally, after years of staring into a book of stats during games and flipping through roster pages, keep my eye literally on the ball, I don’t know that I can stay away.
I suppose it’s a brand new ballgame these days.
I think I like it.
Gary Lloyd is the author of six books and a contributing writer to the Cahaba Sun.
