Pioneer Pride: Part 5-Big Jim Ritacco

I had another great coach in my youth: Big Jim Ritacco. He coached my summer baseball team for four years. He went by Big Jim and his son, Little Jim, was a friend and teammate who lived four houses away.

Big Jim was big, really big, and drove a tanker rig for Chevron or Mobil and always seemed to wear some shirt or cap with a Chevron or Mobil logo. He must have organized the team and a few other fathers pitched in to help. Our home field was the hard pan diamond at Mt Pleasant. I played second base and pitched. I was the lead off batter and hit left handed but threw right handed. If truth be told, I never cared for baseball as a player. Too much standing around and the uniforms were uncool.

I remember very little about my baseball career except I was pretty good and our team was pretty bad. I think we had one winning season and other teams routinely kicked our ass with football-like scores of 35-3 or 21-0. This was long before the 10-rule mercy rule.

None of that losing really mattered because it never mattered to Big Jim. He never yelled. He never got down on his players. He never let us get down on teammates. He never worked the officials. He never swore. Everyone played whether the game was on the line or not (it usually wasn’t) and that included a girl on our team who was so weak and uncoordinated she could not swing a bat completely around or throw to first base if she fielded a grounder playing second base. Big Jim stuck her in right field and treated her like a daughter. I’ll never forget one opposing player ripping a shot over her head. It kept rolling, rolling and rolling, all the way to the school, about a thousand feet away. She retrieved the ball and then threw it toward the infield…it went 30 yards or so and she jogged to it, picked up, and threw it again. This went on for what seemed like forever until I, playing second base, trotted out to meet her, picked up the ball, and winged it to the catcher.

After we retired the side, Big Jim took the center fielder under his arm on the bench and told him he was supposed to be her cutoff man and he had let his teammate down. He told him to apologize to her. He did. This was the mid 70s.

Big Jim clapped and encouraged, he cracked jokes. After every game, he bought us all ice cream at Dairy Queen, A & W or some other joint, and paid for it himself with a fat roll from his pocket. He was one of the most supremely kind men I ever met and later remembered his coaching style (along with Doug Bansch’s) when I got into coaching football, basketball and tennis at various elementary, junior high and high schools.

My baseball career ended in junior high and I lost contact with Big Jim. That is, until one day, toward the end of my ninth grade year, I was hanging with Little Jim at his house when Big Jim showed. He told me he was umpiring baseball for kids and wanted to know if I was interested in becoming an umpire for the upcoming summer season. It paid 13 or 14 bucks a game. I said I was interested. He tossed me a rule book, told me to read it, and that I had to take a written test over the basic rules and procedures. If I passed, he’d take me up to the diamond, guide me through the process, then I would be on my own, a single teenager, in effect, supervising adults. I had to buy my own equipment and uniform, but the gig came with a patch. A patch!

And that was how I became a baseball umpire for four summers. It was the only official job I ever held growing up. Other Pioneers were slinging fast food or working retail; I was calling balls and strikes three or four times a week and some tournament games on weekends.

I could easily write a book about those umpiring days, but two high (low) lights will suffice here: 1) I had to eject a coach who was profanely berating his own kid, who happened to be pitching at the time. The coach also happened to be my former grade school principal! ; 2) I walked off the field in the fourth or fifth inning when parents in the stands, from both teams, all obviously drunk, were insulting one another and threatening to fight. I asked both coaches to get their sides under control or I was leaving. I think I even told the coach of the home team that he would be forfeiting the game because of an obscure provision in the rule book, something about public safety. (I knew the rule book!). Both coaches failed in settling down the mob and I went over to the head scorekeeper, signed the book as a forfeit, walked to my Dasher, and drove away. I called Big Jim when I got home and I swear he was prepared to drive up to Mt. Pleasant and kick someone’s drunken ass.

Consider this dynamic. I was a teenager in charge of adults, highly competitive adults, and in charge of them in a public arena where everyone was watching and their kids’ pride was at stake, not to mention an American male’s ego and sense of self worth.

It was a unique way for a kid to study the adult human condition while also interacting with it in split second moments that required instant, informed judgments. In retrospect, I think it might have been superb preparation for becoming a writer or at least how not to suck as an adult.