Hefty Matters

Lessons from a small town and Little League baseball, which binds it.

“Conway. Small Town, Big Smiles” read the sign on the water tower that greeted visitors along Highway 24. The tower was the town’s most famous landmark, and it spoke the truth. For Little Bobby Jones, Conway was snug – precisely as it always had been and would be.

The town itself was exactly 103 miles from the nearest BigMart. Dan Johannson had measured it himself and then wrote a letter to the State, which had listed the distance on the sign outside town as 102.7 miles, as the crow flies.

“One cannot drive as a crow flies,” he reasoned in his letter, “nor does anyone in Conway wish to do so.” The State changed the sign to 103. That alone would have gotten Johannson elected Mayor if the town had wanted one. 

Conway had lots of shops. There was Dawson’s, the finest confectionery in three states, where the malt balls (“One inch across, guaranteed!”) and root beer floats were legendary. If you were looking for pets, then The Fish Tank at the intersection of Jackson and Second Street was the place to go. Jud Hawthorne sold few fish and even fewer tanks—hamsters and hermit crabs were his top sellers—but he was a retired Navy diver and thought The Fish Tank had a special ring to it. Next door, Mr. Edmonds owned The Hardware Shoppe with two ‘p’s and an ‘e’. If it needed to be fixed, he knew how, and if he didn’t have a part, he would put a sign in his front window asking whether anyone might have a spare. Conway stuck together.

Dawson’s, The Fish Tank, The Hardware Shoppe, and Conway’s other stores all shared the tie that bound the town: Little League baseball. Every boy played in the town league that had been co-ed just two years earlier. There had been a good reason to split the boys from girls. That decision took league officials all of five minutes.

“One of our girls will get killed,” Mrs. Michaels exclaimed.

The reason was Hefty Matters.

For Little Bobby Jones, Little League meant the arrival of Spring after too many feet of snow and enough hot chocolate to fill the water tower. When the time came, he got his father’s shovel to get his glove from the backyard. All the other boys in town broke theirs in under their mattresses, but Little Bobby Jones had read in a magazine at the barber shop that gravity is stronger closer to the center of the Earth, and so he buried his glove along with his only card of Roscoe Shooter, the flamethrowing ace and his favorite player. He tucked the card inside the palm of his glove and let nature do its course from November until April. With each snow, he tried to guess how much weight was pushing down on his glove, keeping it supple. 8,000 lbs. was his best guess. He was seven.

Players were assigned to teams randomly, although the curly-haired Whitfield twins always played together so they could share the family’s only asthma pump. They roamed the outfield for McKinney Oil. There was Drug Store (two words), Jake’s (the barber shop where Little Bobby Jones had discovered gravity), and Mandi’s Nail Salon. No one wanted to play in her pink jerseys, but the boys on the team sure did appreciate dreamy Mandi, who never missed a game. And, of course, Dawson’s, The Fish Tank, and The Hardware Shoppe.

No more than two minutes had passed after jerseys were handed out before The Hardware Shoppe boys had peeled from their yellow jerseys the second ‘p’ and the ‘e’. They thought the extra letters were “foreign,” as one boy heard his older brother say, and so for two years running, the bleachers at Flatbed Park were littered for days with black iron-on ‘p’ and ‘e’ decals that some troublemaker would always use to spell out ‘pep’ and ‘peep’ and ‘pee’ and even ‘pepper,’ except without the ‘r’.

Little Bobby Jones suited up for Drug Store. They roared to a 2-0 start. He had a single and five walks, and shagged two fly balls. He was getting on base – a fine start. After ten games, however, Drug Store was 3-7 with six games remaining.

The last three games of the season were rained out, which meant that Drug Store missed both its back-to-back games against McKinney Oil. The Whitfield twins thus had two days each to catch their breath, and Little Bobby Jones would have to wait for an at-bat that would change his life. 

When only four of the seven remained, Drug Store was still standing. That was a mystery. Then they won again. Little Bobby Jones was now sure that Drug Store was a team of destiny and gravity spurred on by Roscoe Shooter and a lucky spell of team hitting just the right time. Then the team learned that McKinney Oil had shut out Mandi’s in the other semifinal. Everyone knew what that meant.

They would have to face Hefty Matters in the championship game. 

At age five, Hefty Matters was 4’6” and 100 lbs. Two years later, he was even bigger. For years, the town gossiped about his proper Christian name. Thomas? Joseph? Paul? But then old Mrs. Harbuckle charmed a clerk at the hospital into letting her see his birth records. She gasped. Who on Earth named this poor boy Hefty? His parents, that’s who. And hefty he was, strong as an ox.

Children claimed to have seen him pull a tractor with his teeth. Some said that his father, the town Superintendent of Water Works, had asked Hefty to lift one leg of the water tower so that he could stabilize it with wooden planks. True or not, the tower never shook again after Hefty’s sixth birthday. Hefty was so big that he could eat an entire jelly doughnut in one bite without dripping a single drop. Everyone had watched him. And his strength was the reason that girls now played in their own league. He was that strong. He had never hurt a soul—had never even thought about it—but one accidentally misplaced pitch would have spelled disaster.

Little Bobby Jones had never faced Hefty Matters nor did he want to. By the bottom of the last inning of the championship game, home team Drug Store and McKinney Oil were tied 0-0. Hefty Matters on the mound had 15 strikeouts and added two more before Little Bobby Jones approached the plate for this third at bat. He tried his best not to think of the first two.

And while none of McKinney Oil’s players had scored, three times Hefty had hit the ball so hard, so straight, and so true that it got caught in the 4’ chain link fence in the outfield. When Peter Bibsco pried each rocket from the fence and into his glove, the umpire called Hefty out on account that the ball never touched the ground. Hefty almost burst.

Little Bobby Jones was as little as you might imagine. His pants sailed in the wind. His shoes flopped. His glasses slipped down his nose at the wrong times, like when he smiled at Emily Duckwater, the cutest girl at school. He never could get up onto the counter stools at Dawson’s without a boost from a friend. He was lucky, though. Even at that age, kids saw something special in him—a certain kindness that ordinary children pounce on—and so Little Bobby Jones was everyone’s friend.

When Little Bobby Jones walked toward home plate his final time, he noticed something. The catcher—McKinney Oil’s second of the game—could no longer lift his catching hand. He just hoisted it into place with his right hand and held it there. Catching Hefty’s pitches had hurt too much. Meanwhile, the umpire looked afraid, as he had since the first inning. The more strikes he called, the sooner this ordeal would be over.

Little Bobby Jones never enjoyed batting. His helmet was always just a smidge too big over his eyes. His father had helped him figure that he was at the plate only 11% of the time that Drug Store was at bat, whereas in the field he felt alive on every play. Most of all, he felt naked at home plate without his glove and Roscoe Shooter.

Little Bobby Jones never saw Hefty’s first pitch. Neither did the catcher or umpire or anyone in the stands. But the ball was in the catcher’s glove and so the umpire called Strike One emphatically, as though he had followed its trajectory the entire way. On the mound, Hefty Matters was professional. As he looked toward home plate, he barely saw Little Bobby Jones. He focused on the large Oak tree 100 feet past him, and resolved to pitch the ball through the tree. Little Bobby Jones thought he heard Hefty snort like a bull.

Little Bobby Jones never saw the second pitch. Strike Two, the terrified umpire bellowed. The catcher manually adjusted his catching hand back into place. The tree still stood.

Little Bobby Jones called timeout.

He remembered something he had read the afternoon he had brought home a middle school science book on physics, which his dad explained to him. The book said this: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” He had no idea what it meant, but it inspired him, and only inspiration could save him now.

He returned to the batter’s box and stuck his bat out over home plate. He held it there with all his strength. Hefty Matters did snort. Forget the tree, Hefty thought, I’m going to break that bat in two and still put the ball in the catcher’s glove. 

Hefty Matters reared with every ounce he had and then exploded toward the plate. It was his hardest, fastest, most accurate pitch of the game. No one saw it, not even him.

Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash

Little Bobby Jones felt leather on aluminum the moment his bat exploded.

“Strike Three,” the umpire declared, sending the game into extra innings.

But something was wrong. The catcher didn’t have the ball. He showed the umpire his empty glove. That’s when Little Bobby Jones heard the cries.

“Run!” cried his father.

“Run!” cried his coach.

“Run!” screamed a chorus of his teammates and the entire town.

He looked everywhere but couldn’t see the ball, so he just ran as fast as his legs would carry him. The cries continued as he approached second base. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Hefty Matters on his knees praying. What for? Little Bobby Jones could now see third base. The cries grew even louder.

As Little Bobby Jones stepped on third base and made his way toward home, his spectacular fly ball began its return to Earth. It plummeted toward the hollow in right-centerfield manned by the Whitfield twins, who hadn’t needed to move all game. They saw it at the same time and began running toward one another and the exact same spot on the field. By now the bleachers were screaming. Little Bobby Jones was unaware of anything but earth shaking under his feet. The Whitfield twins were on a collision course, but the ball was determined to outrace them.

“They’re going to smack into each other,” someone screamed.

No one else said a word. At the exact same moment, the Whitfield boys leaped as far as they could, arms outstretched, gloves open, lungs at full capacity, parallel to the ground, each ready to beat the ball in their race to where it would land. Only they didn’t. The ball nestled softly into the grass, which was still damp from the rains that had caused those missed games. The Whitfields landed with one thud, their gloves overlapped but a second too late.

All of this transpired in the moments before Little Bobby Jones crossed home plate. There was no one to greet him. His teammates were still in shock. Some thought Marty Whitfield, who came in from right field, had caught the ball. Hefty Matters knew better. He collapsed onto the mound, where he smelled wet earth and tried to drown his other senses.

Conway hadn’t seen something like this since . . . since ever. Pandemonium broke out all over the baseball diamond. Tears flowed. Jubilee.

“Holy shit, a real-life miracle!” said Jud Hawthorne, still an ounce salty from his Navy days. 

Little Bobby Jones made himself even smaller in order to get lost in the commotion. He didn’t care much about the game, which was the unwanted end of the season. He wanted to know just one thing: How was Hefty Matters? He darted until he saw a large figure in the distance, head held down. In the grass outside the exit fence along the first baseline, a sea of dandelions had sprouted. Little Bobby Jones held his breath and waited for Hefty Matters to send a blizzard of seeds across Conway.

Hefty could hardly make out the world through his tears, but he saw the dandelions. He thought about it, he surely did. He nipped one by the stem and admired its heavenly patterns. He thought about it again, rearing back his right foot. And then, mustering all the courage he had, he went around.

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