Looking Up to the Leader of the Pack

The boy is standing in the batting cage, crushing baseballs and singing a Sinatra song.

“You make me feel so young. . . .”

Thwack!

“You make me feel there are songs to be sung. . . .”

Thwack!

The rest of the country is still chipping ice off the sidewalks, and here we are at the batting cage on a recent sunny day, hitting baseballs and feeling young, saluting spring in early February.

“You make me feel so young,” sings the boy, ripping another line drive.

Even without a big orchestra behind him, the boy sounds good. He is using his voice like a slide trombone, the way Sinatra used to. It’s a little high, this voice. But it’s still Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board, three octaves up.

“You make me feel like spring has sprung. . . .”

Thwack!

The boy only knows the one Sinatra song. He heard it on the stereo recently, and he just can’t get it out of his head. Not the song so much. It’s the voice he keeps hearing. That Sinatra voice. Tough. Confident. Kind of cocky. All the things Frank Sinatra and 12-year-old boys are famous for.

Now the boy sings Sinatra everywhere he goes. In the shower. At the dinner table. Even here, at the batting cage.

“Hey, Dad, I wonder if Sinatra played baseball?” the boy asks.

“Probably,” I say.

“I’ll bet you’re right,” he says. “I’ll bet Sinatra played center field.”

As always, the boy and I go over a lot of stuff here at the batting cage. Important stuff. Like how he should keep his head still when he swings. Or how he got jalapeno juice in his eye last week at lunch and thought he was going to die. Or how the Clippers are just five players away from contending.

When we’re done with all that, we talk more about Sinatra.

“Ever hear of the Rat Pack?” I ask him.

“The what?”

“The Rat Pack,” I say.

“Don’t think so,” he says, chopping a grounder back to the pitching machine.

So I tell him about the Rat Pack, about how Sinatra and his buddies hung out together and called everybody “baby” and acted a little like jerks. And how the American public loved them anyway because the Rat Pack was having so much fun.

Back then, you could have a little fun without feeling real guilty about it. Fun didn’t carry the stigma it does today. In fact, back then, life was mostly fun.

“Everybody wanted to be in the Rat Pack,” I tell the boy.

“You think I would’ve been in the Rat Pack?” he asks.

“You might’ve made it,” I say. “Hard to tell.”

I explain to him that if he had been in the Rat Pack, he would’ve had to wear a black tuxedo. The Rat Pack loved black tuxedos, with their bow ties sort of tilted and coming off, probably from having so much fun.

“The Rat Pack always wore black tuxes,” I say.

“Even when they went swimming?” he asks.

“Especially then,” I say.

There’s a sparkle in his eye as he hears more about the Rat Pack. He especially likes the stuff about life being mostly fun. He’s always been a strong proponent of fun.

And now he’s hearing about this group of guys--these adults even--who became famous just for having fun. It gives the boy hope for the future.

“I wish I could’ve played baseball with the Rat Pack,” the boy says.

He imagines what that would’ve been like, playing baseball all day, then wearing tuxedos with crooked bow ties all night, calling everybody “baby” and making pretty girls laugh. It fits nicely with his concept of the perfect life, a concept he first developed about five minutes ago.

“Hey, baby,” he says to his mom when he gets home.

“Hey, who?” his mom asks, not exactly amused.

His mother doesn’t really care who calls her baby, as long as it’s not her son.

“Why’d he call me baby?” she says, turning toward me as if I automatically had something to do with it.

“He’s being a Rat Packer,” I tell her.

“A what?”

“I told him about the Rat Pack,” I explain.

“Oh, great. Which one are you?” she asks the boy. “Dino?”

“I’m Frankie,” he says, with a wink, heading off toward his room with his bat on his shoulder, singing as he goes.

“You make me feel so young. . . .”

* Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.