Vince Coleman wasn’t the first aspiring demolition expert to throw a firecracker into a crowd of people outside a ballpark. Near as I can tell, that honor belongs to me.
I was outside the ballpark, but my targets were in the visitor’s dugout. They were Little Leaguers. Me, I never played.
Coleman, you recall, hurled an M-80 out the window of a car driven by Eric Davis. Three were hurt, one of them a two-year-old girl. Coleman was a New York Met and Davis an L.A. Dodger. Hell, they should have thrown ’em both in jail for that alone.
Me, I was running with the wrong crowd too. It was 1969 and my family had just moved to Tampa from Chicago. Tampa didn’t even have a baseball team, serving only as the spring-training home of the Cincinnati Reds. But it did have its share of juvenile delinquents,
On the day in question, Mitchell, Jeff and I were riding our Stingrays and chuckin’ Black Cat firecrackers at stuff. I was doing most of the chuckin’, actually, because I was the guy trying to prove he was cool. We rode past a Little League game and one of the players riding the pine for the home team dared me start shelling the opposition. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I lit a Black Cat and fired it at a small window in the visitor’s dugout.I guess you’d have to call my throw a “wild pitch.” It was the kind of toss that makes batters charge the pitcher with their bat in hand. I missed my target by a mile. The sizzling firecracker hit the cinder block dugout wall and came flying toward me like a liner back to the mound. I tried to slap it away just as it detonated. After my hand exploded—and after I stopped crying—I remember making up some story about how two or three “big guys in a car” threw the firecracker at me and then drove away. (“Honest, coach, it was the big guys.”)
Didn’t Vince Coleman finally say he’d learned a lot from his mistake? I learned a lot, too.
Little League is where you acquire ball control. And stay out of baseball if you have a short fuse.
— Stephen Buel
Originally published 1994
Vol. 1/Number 2
