No Guts, No Glory

     Twice Doug McIntyre raced across left field, the sun beginning to set behind him, attempting to snare long flyballs only to have them clank off his glove. It was not a good day for the Bucco outfield as Yankee flyballs kept dropping to the grass next to our players like quail in the English hunting season. We lost to a team with a losing record 10-6.

     The Buccos had the whole catalog of bad plays: Wild throws, costly running mistakes, dropped flyballs, lunging grotesquely at short pitches, me walking their lowest-rated player.

     Doug, 66, and a former TV sitcom writer, was hardly amused afterward. But I said watching him go for it was thrilling, because the vast majority of the outfielders in this league are going to play it safe and let it drop. In his case, the balls ricocheted off his glove to the ground at his feet; he quickly picked them up and threw to the cutoff man, so the runner didn’t advance. As a sometime outfielder, I know how difficult those catches can be when you're running hard on the lumpy outfield grass and your vision of the landscape is jumping up and down like the Big One has struck. He went for it. It could have been an unlikely and thrilling catch that would get everybody fired up. I made that point also in my weekly email game recap to the team.

     The hottest day of summer also saw Bucco bats go cold. With just two hits the first time through the order, we were down 7-0 by the 4th inning.

     I had this sick feeling at home before it all unraveled that this could be a "trap game", in which we come out flat against an opponent we should easily beat.

     Yankee manager Joey Carbone, who had subbed for us three times earlier this season, agreed.

     "It wasn't the same Bucco team," Joey told me afterward. "I thought there was no way we were going to win this game."

     The next two games were scrubbed due to extreme heat in the Valley, where temperatures have soared to near 100 degrees. No country for old men. The Buccos are now 5-4-1 in a virtual tie for fourth place. In the 14-team league.

     Doug, meanwhile, has been busy promoting his debut novel “Frank’s Shadow”, described in one review as “a deeply (sometimes darkly) human story wrapped in the trappings of a delightfully gritty love letter to New York City’s less glamorous neighborhoods.”

     Doug, tall, white-haired and handsome with his white-frame glasses, is one of the premier media personalities in Los Angeles. The former WABC radio talk show host, is also a newspaper columnist and events emcee.. Born and raised on Long Island, Doug got his start in show business hustling jokes for New York comics. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s after finding script-writing work on TV sitcoms.

     In 1992, Doug was writing a TV episode of “League of Their Own”. Tom Hanks, who starred in the iconic movie and was directing the TV episode, was chatting backstage at that year’s Oscars with Italian film director Federico Fellini, who was getting a Lifetime Achievement award, Doug told me. Hanks, describing the episode to Fellini, mentioned the script called for a pet monkey in the stands to be knocked dead by a foul ball. Fellini was shocked. “You can’t kill a monkey. Everybody will hate you!”

     Said Doug: “I guess I can say I once had a script rewritten by Fellini.”

     A lifelong baseball fan (the Mets), Doug began playing senior league softball about four years ago, and his lanky athleticism quickly made him one of the top players in the league.

     “I love the game of baseball,” he told me. “I love the people, the variety of life experiences and careers they bring to the game – you have stuntmen and actors, lawyers, plumbers and delivery truck guys, and on the field, everybody’s the same.”

     The game connects us back to the agonies and ecstasies of our youth but with a new sense of urgency.

     “We’re running short of time,” Doug says. “We don’t know how long we can do this, and we’re milking it for every inning we can.”