Ballin'

Balls! What a concept.

Balls for baseball, balls for pool, balls for football and basketball too. Balls for cricket and tennis and bowling, balls used in golf that just keep on a-rolling. Rugby’s got balls, and so does lacrosse, so if you don’t love balls, then dude, it’s your loss.

It’s an amazing invention that no one ever talks about.

Why should they? It’s not like the ball is a hot new innovation. Certain ancient Egyptian monuments depict people playing some sort of ball game (I’d squibble my gizzards if it was soccer), and in Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey,” the protagonist spots a character named Nausicaa playing ball with a bunch of maidens, thus laying the foundation for the modern WNBA. So it’s been around.

What’s more, most of are introduced to the whole ball concept while we’re barely old enough to make a play for grandpa’s nose hairs. When considering buying a toy for a pint-sized youngun’, you really can’t go wrong with a brightly colored ball of some kind, providing it’s not small enough to be swallowed or inserted into any bodily orifices. This gift idea also works across species, including dogs, cats and for some strange reason, seals, who handle balls better than most of the starters on the New England Patriots’ receiving corps.

Which means we shrug when we see balls of most varieties. Spotting one is a non-event, inspiring exactly zero “Dear Diary” entries. Yet most of us have at least one ball story.

Here’s one. In high school I belonged to a clique of music dorks and drama nerds with the combined athleticism of a stoned sea urchin. Every once in awhile, when we weren’t rehearsing showtunes or spending allowance money on vanilla lattes (a rowdy bunch we were), we’d head down to the local ballfield to play pickup games of softball, which typically devolved into four-man batting practices as the outfield trickled home to solve algebra problems and apply acne cream. On one such outing, I found myself locked into a rare groove: While I generally couldn’t hit a grizzly bear with a bat the size of a solar panel, I was seeing the ball that day with eerie clarity. We had long given up on trying to complete an actual game, so I settled into the batter’s box, eyeing underhand pitches from a classmate and drilling them one after another into a summer field of purest green.

I got cocky. Big mistake. Because balls are unpredictable, see. Their spherical shape gives them a tendency to spin and curve in unanticipated ways, and only a veteran batsman would have known, with near 100-percent certainty, which pitches were too dangerous to try to pummel. After crack-whipping about a dozen consecutive softballs into the center field expanse -- and feeling very Ted Williams-like in the process --  the pitcher lobbed me a meatball that trailed to the inside, arcing in toward my hands.

Had I been playing a for-real game, I would have taken it for ball one. But I was on a roll. In unconscious imitation of the Incredible Hulk, I wanted to smash, smash, smash. So I swung the bat, and instead of hitting the ball flush with the barrel, I nicked it with the handle, which normally would have resulted in a foul tip, some bruised knuckles, and a string of expletives that could have melted the chrome of a Cadillac fender.

Instead, the ball’s spin and trajectory met the angle of the bat handle awkwardly. It caromed off my Louisville Slugger and hit me square in the face.

An inch or two to the left and it would have broken my nose. It was a softball, remember, meaning it had roughly the size and heft of a small dog. And my nose is a pretty big target. Long and beaklike, it’s a miracle it hasn’t gotten clipped by a passing bus.

As it happened, the ball slammed into my right cheek, just below the eye. I wore thick glasses at the time, and the right lens was caught by the force of the projectile and driven into the flesh just below the cheekbone.

Four stitches. Thanks a lot, ball.

Another type of ball or spherical object and it may not have done quite as much damage. If I’d gotten hit with a golf or ping-pong ball it would have caromed off my glasses with a cute little ping sound and that would have been the end of it. For that matter, if it had been a clown nose, I wouldn’t have felt it at all. But it would definitely have raised the question of why I was standing in a field hitting clown noses with a baseball bat.

I like to envision what the future may hold; you could call speculation a bit of a hobby of mine. Yet predicting the ball’s future is nearly impossible. The concept may be old, but specific balls for specific things are new -- your baseballs and basketballs and American footballs. These sporting implements couldn’t possible exist before the inception of their respective sports, and those sports were all invented within the last couple hundred years. The oldest of them, baseball, is still younger than the Liberty Bell, which in turn is much younger than ancient Egyptian civilization, which in its turn is only slightly older than Larry King. So over the next 200 years, it’s possible we’ll be filling stadiums for sports that haven’t even been invented yet, played by balls that are beyond the scope of our imaginations. Heat-seeking balls that change course in mid-air. Balls that sprout wings and fly. Super-intelligent balls that can avoid volleyball spikes and then beat you at chess. Anything’s possible.

So simple and perfect, the ball. So versatile. Just be sure you don’t take one in the face. It’s never a good time.