How playing catch helped this gay baseball fan ‘slay my dragons’ of Little League trauma

One of the beautiful things about baseball is that you’re never too old to fall in love with it.

Even if it was largely responsible for repelling you from sports for decades.

Michael Nehring is an accomplished actor, director, and recently retired theater professor who taught for 42 years. 

When he was growing up as a gay kid in the 1950s and 60s, the experience of trying to play baseball in a hypermasculine straight world scarred him. For decades, he thought that pain would last all of his life.

Zack Parker is a straight retired minor league pitcher who played professionally from 2001-08 and then moved onto a career in the media industry.

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This is, naturally, a story of unlikely friendship. But more than that, it’s about how their shared love of baseball helped Nehring heal some of the wounds that the game had caused.

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For most of his life, Nehring assumed that he would never experience anything worthwhile in sports. His Little League experience was a two year-long exercise in psychological torment. He still refers to it as a gulag.

The oldest of four boys, Nehring was the son of a sports-crazed father. In his baby book, his dad wrote that his No. 1 dream for his eldest was “I hope he bowls a perfect game.”

To say the least, this was not the ideal environment for gay kid who “wrestled with my femininity my whole life” and who preferred to draw.

“All we knew was shame,” Nehring said.

To this day, he does not have a lot of memories of his childhood due to disassociation. He recalled playing for the Phillies in Little League and liking their maroon color. 

He also remembered playing right field as hell on earth. Every fly ball was an opportunity for potential injury and humiliation. Nehring was mercilessly taunted with the epithet “sissy”—not just from other kids, but also from older men in the stands.

“It was not a safe environment. It was so male. So toxically heteronormative male,” he said.

Finally, after two years of this ordeal, he asked his father to let him quit. He was relieved when his dad gave him permission.

And that, he thought, was the end of his experience with baseball.

Second chance

It wasn’t until three years ago that Nehring even considered giving the game another chance. At the time, one of his longtime friends remarked that since he was into “nerdy” pastimes, she thought he might find something to like about baseball.

After initial hesitance, they decided to make a pilgrimage to Dodger Stadium. As soon as Nehring walked out of the concourse and beheld the radiant setting for the first time, he experienced an unexpected “Field of Dreams” moment.

“The stadium was so beautiful, even though the history of that stadium is pretty spicy,” he remarked, “But I’m a Los Angeles person and I look out and it’s LA at its best, really.”

Nehring soon discovered that it wasn’t just the lush green field and towering stands that thrilled his aesthetic senses. That night, the game of baseball revealed its artistic beauty as well.

Mookie Betts took over with his five-tool brilliance in the field, at bat, and on the bases. Freddie Freeman stretching at first base reminded Nehring of a ballet dancer.

Out of nowhere, he was hooked.

As he summed up his first baseball experience in decades, “The Dodgers healed me. I could feel it that first night in the Stadium. I could feel the crystalization of the internal hatred and shame just slowly disappearing. And recognizing, ‘Wait a minute, this is my sport! I understand this! This belongs to me!’”

Despite his newfound excitement, though, anytime Nehring sat in the lower deck and a foul ball was hit toward his vicinity, he still reflexively froze up and cringed in fear.

“I just felt emasculated,” he explained, “I should be able to catch a fly ball! What’s wrong with me? And I knew what was wrong with me but my body didn’t know. It hadn’t experienced anything to heal itself.”

His painful sense memories were making it impossible to enjoy his newfound passion anywhere but far away in the upper deck.

‘I’ve always hated your kind’

Nehring wondered if he could ever work through his trauma or if he’d be stuck reliving it anytime he got close to a playing field.

As Parker remembers it, Nehring’s first words to him were “I’ve always hated your kind.”

To Nehring’s recall, it was more like “I’ve always been afraid of guys like you.”

About a year after he began going to Dodgers games, Nehring attended a social event in L.A. when he overheard Parker talking about his playing career. 

Having just kindled a love for the game, Nehring struck up a conversation with that tongue-in-cheek icebreaker and told Parker his story, emphasizing the oftentimes traumatic role baseball played in it.

Parker had come of age in the late 1990s, an era that he described as “the last stage of jocks ruling the school and the world.” He understood where Nehring’s pain came from.

As they connected over the game, Nehring mentioned that he always wanted to learn to catch a pop-up. At the time, Parker didn’t think anything of it.

The two kept in touch and periodically talked Dodger baseball. Then on a whim last October, Nehring texted that he had an extra playoff ticket for that night’s game.

Which happened to be NLCS Game 4: the night Shohei Ohtani transcended every fan’s conception of what was humanly possible by crushing three home runs while striking out 10 on the mound as the Dodgers won the pennant.

“To share it with Michael was really special just because we come at the game from vastly different perspectives. But to be both sitting there losing our minds with the rest of the stadium, it was really cool,” Parker said.

Sharing a piece of baseball history brought the two even closer. As they continued to socialize over the next few months, Nehring kept dropping hints that he really wanted to learn to catch a fly ball properly. 

Still, Parker didn’t take it too seriously. But gradually, he began to realize how important this was.

Finally, the two of them agreed to give playing catch a shot in June. Nehring was intimidated but gave himself an extra bit of courage by wearing his Dodgers jersey.

Just like when he watched his first Dodgers game in person, the memories from Nehring’s life in the performing arts kicked in and connected him. 

Remembering how he taught acting students breathing techniques to release physical tension, he focused on his breath as Parker began throwing him pop-ups.

That sense of familiarity was what Nehring was looking for. 

“I could remember those balls he was throwing,” he narrated, “When I breathed and relaxed, there was no fear. In fact, it was really meditative and beautiful. Watching it come [down], it was lovely. And feeling it hit the mitt, it was so satisfying.”

For the first seven decades of his life, all of baseball’s sensory experiences made Nehring wince. Now, he was finally getting to savor them for the first time.

“You know when the [audience] gives it to you? And it’s absolutely clear that you’re on the money and you’re serving? And you’re in that moment relaxed and there’s nothing sweeter? That’s what it felt like when the ball hit the mitt,” he said.

Parker understood why those moments were so powerful. “We’re all so disconnected right now,” he explained, “But you have to be connected to catch a baseball. You have to be locked in on your partner and on the ball. It forces you to be present.”

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For the first time in his seven decades, Nehring was getting to experience that connection in a positive way.

“A radically different experience and completely healing! Standing in it as a player, playing it with a straight guy who did it professionally…it was cool!” he said.

Yes, Nehring was even starting to talk like a ballplayer.

Throughout it all, Parker encouraged him with exhortations like, “God, dude, you’re a natural!”

“To have him say that to me, it wasn’t even confidence, it was joy,” Nehring said. “The release of joy. Oh my God, I’ve found a way into this! I’ve found a place. And I don’t have to give up being nonbinary me!”

Parker was preoccupied with throwing the ball and filming at the same time. But when he watched some of the footage afterward, that same emotion began to stand out.

“There’s a couple of little clips where he catches it and it’s like pure joy! Like a little kid. That was so amazing to be a part of,” he said.

When they later assembled video of them playing catch into a social media post, Nehring said, “I met those dragons from over 60 years ago. And I started to slay them.”

And Parker also took away something valuable from the experience, as sharing that moment with Nehring brought him closer to baseball.

“I never got too far away from the game but the last few years, I’m slowly being drawn back to it. And it’s not necessarily about the stats or what’s happening in the actual game. But it’s the human stories that are bringing me back,” he said.

Human stories like helping a friend fall deeper in love with the sport and healing his trauma through a simple game of catch.

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