Knuckle Ball

(Note: start with "Slider" below)
Last year I was the rabbit caught in headlights at the first Pee Wee Baseball meeting, but it didn't last long. There was no time or opportunity to let one's own crap interfere. But here's my crap anyway -

I never played organized ball. Some of this was personal inclination toward different kinds of play (reading, organizing long bike expeditions all over town with friends and cousins, fishing in the canal, playing astronaut or pilot, or army or endlessly watching old movies on UHF channels). Some of this was a function of growing up with my grandparents who were just a little past pushing this kind of thing.

Even with the sandlot pick-up games, I became discouraged. This was back before kids were over-scheduled, over-chaperoned and made victims of their parents' persistent anxieties and fear of crime completely manipulated by sensationalist media. Kids organized their own games in their own, relatively copious, free time. No adults bothered with you unless you broke a window. A few of the older kids even helped the younger kids learn. Some of the older kids razzed and were cruel, but you had to learn to deal with them, too. You learned the rules by arguing about them. You learned the positions and the skills by making mistakes, possibly facing ridicule, possibly by having someone's older brother come over and explain it to you, half exasperated, mumbling through a cheekful of Bazooka Bubble Gum from Tommy's store - (the place that smelled like dusty cardboard and had ancient fly paper hung with horrorshow collections of ancient flies, and where you'd stand and read comic books and Mad Magazine back when it was good and irreverant and not just lewd, and where you found out when you were older that bookies used to collect bets and Tommy himself used to shoot junk in the back).

And if you were short a full diamond you played wiffleball and did away with the outfield. Or if you were really short people you canvassed the neighborhood with your glove hung on the end of your bat, bat over the shoulder, shuffling in your Keds from house-to-house. "Hello Missus Dalinsky. Can Danny come out and play?"

However, I was nearsighted. I couldn't catch a fly ball to save my life. Ground balls always hit me in the chin or the teeth. I got confused by what was going on and where I was supposed to throw the ball. I got picked last. I took a lot of crap and regularly felt outclassed by other kids who seemed to have the "ability". Finally, I would just disappear and go home if it looked like random batting or catching might develop into a game.

You feel very alone in that when your eight years old, but the reality is you have a lot of invisible company. So here's my coaching philosophy: remember that kid. All the rest follows.

Ah, but when you're out there with the other coaches all those sandlot egos from thirty years ago are there. I can't pretend this wasn't a second chance to learn and love the game. To see the whole process from the lens of adult experience and from the viewpoint of a skinny eight-year-old who wanted to go home and watch The Monkees rerun at 4:30 rather than stand in right field in the hot sun.

At the end of the day you want those kids to go home feeling like they got something out of it - they've done something they didn't think they could do like catch a ball out of mid air, or follow the play and try to get the runner out, or share a good joke with their team. You want them to go home feeling like, even if there's stuff they don't understand or don't get, that many people are personally interested in helping them in a positive way, and all those people are convinced they'll get it with a little practice. Now go home and watch The Monkees on DVD.

Nice and inspiring, until you meet up with Alpha Team, the team engineered by the parents whose older kids are already in Little League, the team honed to a fine precision by the practiced eyes of competitive baseball dads. Thirty years ago these were the kids who called you "pussy" for swishing your bat at a perfectly good fair pitch. These were the hardass kids who'd trip you when you rounded second and call you clumsy as they spit a big hocker on the ground next to you. Thirty or so years have not been kind to their midriffs, chins, sense of fairness or vocabulary development.

No girls on their team. Funny thing. But your ragged group of multi-racial boys and girls, some of whom are from countries where baseball isn't even a word, has to face this ravening pack of wolves who have been drilled to win. My kids have to face the progeny of my old nemesis. I have to face my old nemesis. The dragon raises its armoured head as I wish I had sharpened the Vorpal Sword a little more.

Next: "To beat them is to join them", or "Yes, they will probably kick our ass, so we better have some fun"