In honor of Major League Baseball’s opening day today, I thought I would post an early story of mine about Red Sox Hall-of-Famer Jim Rice. Below are the original manuscript pages, followed by the complete annotated text:
A Stranger, but a Friend at the Door
by Tim Ellis
One day I opened the door to go play baseball with my friends. A big tall person was standing at the door. He looked familiar but I couldn’t recognize him. He wasn’t Santa Claus and he certainly wasn’t the Jolly Green Giant. Just then it came to me, it was Jim Rice!1
I was so embarrassed that I didn’t ask him to come in.
“Hello!” he said. “I’m Jim Rice, I hear you like to play baseball and are pretty good at it!!”2
“Where’s your uniform?” I asked.
“I’m not allowed to wear it off the field. It’s the property of the team,” he said.3
He gave me some free tickets to the baseball game.
“Thanks!” I said excitedly.
"I’ll be playing too,” he said.
The next day I took him to baseball practice. The coach wasn’t aware of things that day.4 He didn’t even notice that Jim Rice was with me. When I told him that my friend was a Major League baseball player, he swallowed half his chewing gum and spit out the rest.
Jim watched while I hit, I got to second base. Then the coach let him hit, and he hit it over the fence twice as far as it needed to go to be a homerun. It went so fast that it knocked the eagle right off the top of the flagpole.5
“Not bad for a Major League baseball player who won the M.V.P. award with 46 homeruns, 406 hits, and a .315 average.” I said jokingly.6
“No not bad!” he replied.
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1. Jim Rice was a power-hitting left fielder who played for the Boston Red Sox from 1974 to 1989. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009. Rice was my hero, so you can imagine my thrill when he showed up at my house in Norway, Maine, for no reason.
2. I was pretty good at baseball, but not until a couple years later (when I played starting catcher and made the Western Maine Little League All-Star team). When this was written, I was striking out a lot. There are elements of fantasy, or exaggeration, in this story.
3. In those days, the personal use of official team gear was strictly prohibited. MLB clubs often went so far as to print “property of” on clothing.
4. The coach must have been completely out of his mind not to notice a large black man, in a town where almost everyone was white, hanging out at Farm Team practice.
5. I like to think there is still no eagle on the flagpole at this field, after the Jim Rice incident, but I haven’t actually checked. The fact that Rice’s blast traveled two lengths of the field, even after hitting the eagle, makes you wonder how far it could have gone!
6. Rice’s 1978 statistics, worked seamlessly into the dialogue, are mostly correct. He had 406 total bases, not hits (of which he had 213). The single-season hit record is 262 (by Ichiro Suzuki in 2004), so 406 would have been a super-human feat. But I would have believed it, coming from Jim.