The Backyard Batting Cage

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This Sunday, just as he has for several years, Mike Tafelski expects to have find moments of "pure joy" at a local baseball field.

But it won't come from Tafelski driving a pitch over the trees in a local softball league or from watching the Lancaster Barnstormers wrap up their first series of the season with a "W."

It will come from seeing a young player's "face light up when the ball hits the bat," as he puts it, "and to see them out there for the sheer joy of playing baseball."

Tafelski, of Manheim Township, is commissioner of the Challenger Little League of Lancaster County, which gives some 175 youngsters with special needs the chance to play ball.

The 2011 season, the league's 22nd, begins Sunday with a series of games at Strasburg's Jaycee Park.

And it's baseball as it should be, Tafelski notes — no steroids and no big contracts, just the joy of kids playing the summer game.

There's no fee to play in the Challenger League, there are no practices, and no scores are kept.

But the league does something more important than naming a champion, Tafelski notes: "It gives everybody a chance to play, and it gives everybody a chance to be a part of a team."

The 12-team league, which will rotate games among several local fields across nine Sundays this spring and summer, offers special-needs children age 5 to 18 "the opportunity to enjoy baseball regardless of the challenges they face," a league description states.

Some of the players, when they hit a ball, need to be pushed in their wheelchair to first base.

One youngster told Tafelski she wants to wink at the pitcher, just like a player in the classic baseball movie "Field of Dreams."

The league offers "an extremely safe environment, where winning is least important and where making every player feel like a winner is most important," its description adds.

Tafelski, 45, is an attorney with the U.S. Justice Department in Philadelphia during the week. Then, on Sundays, he gets to see "the excitement the players get when they stop a ground ball hit to them, or when they get a hit."

"Major Leaguers get excited when they get a hit, too," he said, "and it's the same for these kids."

Tafelski is the third person to serve as commissioner of the league, which was started in the late 1980s in the county's southern end "by people who thought it was important for special-needs children to have an opportunity to play baseball," he said.

Other fields for the league this year include Akron's Roland Park, Paradise Park and Willow Street's Garrett Park.

The league also will hold its annual fundraiser, a benefit golf tournament, on Saturday, June 3, at Tanglewood Manor Golf Club in Quarryville.

The tourney provides the main financial support for the league. Its rain date is July 22.

Born in the Detroit area, Tafelski moved to Lancaster County as a child and grew up here, graduating from Lancaster Catholic High School in 1984.

He played football as a walk-on at Notre Dame, graduating in spring 1988 before his Fighting Irish teammates won the national championship that fall.

Tafelski's younger daughter, Elizabeth, 17, has multiple medical issues and developmental delays.

When Tafelski and his wife, Terry, first found out about the Challenger League, "we were excited that she (Elizabeth) could play since she has an older sister (Kate, 19, a student at Loyola University in Maryland) who played sports, and Elizabeth just enjoyed going out and playing baseball."

Registration ended in late March for this season, but before it did, some 50 new youngsters signed up, "and to hear the excitement in the parents' voices, knowing there was something out there for their youngsters, where they can play, is really rewarding," Tafelski said.

"It's kids of all shapes and sizes, with all backgrounds, all on the same team."

For information on the league, Tafelski can be reached at 682-0938. For details on the golf tournament, e-mail 2010Challenger@comcast.net.

doconnor@lnpnews.com

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On the individual Division pages to the right and at the top of the website, I’ve posted the schedules for Double-A and T-Ball. We’re trying also to add these games to the “Calendar” section as well.

Plant Sale forms can still be turned in for those who have not yet. Our Plant Sale fundraiser orders were down dramatically this year – if you still have interest in submitting an order please turn them in at the snack shack for the remainder of this week, or hand them to your coaches.

Also, 7% OFF Coupons to the Ivory Restaurant are available at the Snack Shack. The Ivory will pay Little League 7% of your bill when the coupon is presented at your table.

Lastly, Deep River Little League logo gear is still available for sale in the Snack Shack. Lots of inventory left.

All these things are fundraising efforts for Little League.

Thanks for your support!

Thanks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Starting out when most youths have a couple of seasons under their belts, David is soaking up instruction and having a blast. The fourth-grader is riding a surge of new players drawn to the game by the Giants' exciting and improbable World Series win.

“I watched almost every playoff and World Series game. It was really fun. The Giants are my favorite team,” said David, a wrestler and football player. “This year, I wanted to play baseball.”

Westside Little League, where David plays, has had a 12 percent increase in players. With the new season under way, youth baseball leagues across Sonoma County report similar gains.

More youths playing baseball in the North Bay contrasts with a national trend that finds the numbers declining over the past decade.

Much of the North Bay's growth is at the youngest ages, when boys and girls start out in T-ball and machine pitch divisions without keeping score or standings. Yet new players well into elementary school have signed up in surprising numbers for competitive play leading to regional and all-star tournaments.

“Through the ranks it seems there's a lot of first-time players, more than I've ever seen,” said Mike Harris, president of the Rohnert Park Cal Ripken league, where registration is up 15 percent. “The Giants created some baseball fever.”

Such unexpected growth means finding more parents to coach, fields to play on and extending schedules to accommodate games.

“We pressed a lot of inexperienced coaches into service. We're maxed out on fields,” said Keith Lua, Westside Little League president. “We're bringing in new blood.”

For the Tigers in Westside's minors division, that includes both David and his father, David Zarate Jr.

“I've never played baseball,” Zarate said. “But when I went to the coaches meeting, there was no coach for his team. I stood up and said I'm willing to learn and do it for the kids.”

Father and son have been learning together. Zarate participated in a class and clinic to learn basic rules of the game and drills to teach skills.

Having a pair of assistant coaches who played and know the game helps.

“Just being a team and working with these guys, we let them know there's a way to play baseball,” Zarate said.

Learning how to catch, throw and hit a baseball when his teammates are picking up finer points of the game has not discouraged David. He too must know cutoffs on throws from the outfield or tagging up to advance on a fly ball.

“I'm getting there,” David said.

Pitching has been a highlight of the season. David recorded 15 strikeouts in the first three games and made a memorable play.

A batter struck a ground ball up the middle that David snagged on a dive and then threw out the runner trying to score from third base. “It felt really good,” he said.

Coming back to baseball never felt better for Nick Goodacre, playing in the Rincon Valley Little League in east Santa Rosa.

“It's getting way easier. I've learned a lot. I think I'm going to improve a lot for next year,” Nick said.

The same could not be said five years ago when, as a 7-year-old, Nick put away his glove after a first season with few highlights.

“I didn't really enjoy it that much. I didn't even watch baseball much,” said Nick, who also plays tennis.

That the Giants weren't very good then didn't help. Nick's enthusiasm, though, grew two years ago when the team contended and fell just short of the playoffs, recording San Francisco's first winning campaign in five seasons.

“After the Giants started doing good, I started wanting to play. But I wasn't totally sure about it yet,” Nick said.

Nick began playing catch and hitting balls again with his father, Matt, that season. Father and son played more often during the Giants' run to the 2010 World Series title.

“It influenced me a lot,” Nick said. “It made me think that I could be doing that same thing in Little League.”

Having to try out and be drafted onto a team in the Santa Rosa league was an initial indication baseball would be more competitive this time. Landing on the Orioles was a plus as the birds of Baltimore also wear orange and black.

“I like hitting and outfield. Stealing bases is a really important part of baseball that I want to do,” Nick said.

Nick is brave to play in the majors division, where the nation's best teams reach the Little League World Series. Experienced coaches and encouraging teammates have eased Nick's return to baseball.

“I'm kind of anxious like I want to get on the field. It's very exciting,” he said.

Growth in the Petaluma American Little League — up 10 percent — is split between young players and those in the age 9 to 11 ranks.

Drawing players who are coming back to baseball is a pleasant surprise, said league president Jorge Villarreal

“When you're coming in green as an older kid, it can be intimidating at times, but actually the kids do well,” he said. “Our goal with a kid like that is to make sure we give them proper instructions and give them an opportunity.”

The Giants' success surely sparked more interest in playing baseball, Villarreal said.

“I think it helped out. You see a lot of the excitement,” he said.

The way in which the Giants reached baseball's pinnacle — the torture of nail biting games — revealed the game for its difficulty and its reward.

Young players know how challenging baseball can be. But the better you get, the more fun you have playing this great game.

“A lot of mistakes will be made, but we keep it fun,” said Zarate, the Westside league manager. “We're having a great time. That's the most important thing.”

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As super league has already been in progress for a few months it is time for city league baseball (Little League) to get under way.  Many cities in our neck of the woods started practicing a few weeks ago and had their first games this week.  Many pitchers are involved in both leagues here in Utah and I’m sure it’s the same in most states.

This is the time of year where coaches need to be made aware how many pitches their pitchers are really throwing each week!  If they pitch for you they most likely pitch for another team.  It is also important to know how often your pitchers are throwing if they play other positions as well.  I have talked to some coaches lately who said that between tournaments in Super League and city league their players had 8 games in 4 days.  One father told me his son pitched two 3 inning games but failed to keep track of how many pitches he threw.  Some of those innings can really drag on with all of the errors Little League teams can make.  Pitchers can have 30 pitch innings in some cases.

The problem we see in Little League is, more often than not, these pitchers seem to have a more rigorous throwing schedule than Major League pitchers.  This posses a problem for these young pitchers.  Not only are they still developing their mechanics, they are still developing and are more prone to arm injury if they are not monitoring how many pitches they throw off a mound each week.

It is also important for coaches to understand that after a pitcher has thrown 45-60 pitches they should not throw anymore that day.  I’ve seen some coaches have their pitchers warm up (throw) an hour after their first game with the rest of the team on double header games.  The worst is watching a kid throwing long toss with one of the outfielders less than 30 minutes after a long outing on the mound.

If your coaching Little League just use your best judgment out there.  Monitor the simple things like pitch count and how often the pitchers are throwing.

Don’t forget this week’s special offer on our hitting mechanics and Drills DVD.  Nate did a fantastic job and goes into great detail about how you can increase your batting average and hit more ropes.  We are confident you will learn a ton and be able to apply it on the field.  You may also receive our hitting mechanics DVD getting the best discount and the most benefit with our latest DVD series.  You get it all here!

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When Linda Walker drives north on Highway 118 from her West Texas home in Terlingua toward Alpine, she spots the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint ahead and thinks to herself, "Do I have time today?" Does she have time, she asks, to get “belligerent” with the agents, in their now ubiquitous green fatigues, who will inevitably ask about her citizenship? And that's not all.

“They’ll ask where you’re coming from, where you’re going,” says Walker, who owns Big Bend Stables in Study Butte and the Lajitas Stables. “Their new question is, ‘Have you seen anything suspicious?’ You drive out of here in the evening and there’s a good chance there’s going to be a patrolman right on your ass to pull you over because he doesn’t have anything better to do.”

Border Patrol agents say they stick only to asking about citizenship when questioning drivers; Walker says she gets grilled for much more. She is what agents call a “crabby” local — and as their ranks have swelled in Brewster and Presidio counties, so has the number of crabby locals who would just as soon be left alone.

Since 2006, about 500 additional agents have been assigned to the Border Patrol’s sprawling Marfa Sector, which covers 165,000 square miles, including 510 miles of border. The sector now has about 700 agents. The Border Patrol has massively stepped up its recruitment efforts in the last four years, upping the number of agents nationwide from 12,000 to 20,000, says Marfa Sector spokesman Bill Brooks. While they have always patrolled the southernmost regions of Brewster County, most were assigned to the northern towns of Alpine and Marathon until recently. Today, they patrol closer to the Rio Grande in remote places like Terlingua. “Before, we had to sit and wait for [illegal traffickers] to come to us,” Brooks says. “Now we can catch them a little quicker, or get behind them.”

To be sure, many residents here feel safer with more agents scanning for drug traffickers. But others who have lived for decades in these isolated areas see all the added security as overkill in what is a relatively safe region. The only populated border cities of any size for hundreds of miles are Presidio and Ojinaga, and together those communities number fewer than 30,000. The rugged landscape here — jagged mountains and brutal desert line both sides of the Rio Grande — keeps the drug trafficking significantly lower than in other border areas. Marfa Sector agents have made 4,384 arrests since October of last year, drastically lower than their counterparts in Tucson, the busiest border sector, who made more than 183,000. The area’s isolation and foreboding terrain have also kept the drug cartels from infiltrating the Mexican lands across the river from Brewster County, though some still manage to make it across.

“These counties have been significant drug corridors, but because we’re so huge and spread out, a lot of activity goes unnoticed,” says Brewster County Judge Val Beard. “We still have traffic, but nothing like the levels of other areas.”

Bored on the Border

Most of the new Border Patrol agents come from all corners of the United States and are unfamiliar with the laid-back flow of rural country living, residents say. Veteran agents — the ones folks have come to know as neighbors — grew up in the area, mostly in towns like Alpine, Marfa and Fort Davis, and they are active members of their communities. Those larger towns also are accustomed to seeing agents tooling around in their white SUVs, touring area schools, eating at local restaurants and coaching little league baseball games. In far-flung border outposts like Terlingua, the new agents don't quite fit in.

Brent Charlesworth, who manages Paisano Cattle Company ranch in Marathon, along Highway 385, and serves on the Marathon school board, says the new agents have not made an effort to ingratiate themselves to his community. Border Patrol agents have destroyed gates and cattle guards on his ranch, he says. (Agents are legally allowed to patrol private ranch land within 25 miles of the river, but Charlesworth's land is further north, so he has limited the agency’s access to Paisano ranch.)

“The government hired so many so fast that they don’t have an etiquette or bedside manner of country life,” Charlesworth says. “There’s a different way you talk to ranchers and people who live here and make their livings in small town communities.”

Border Patrol Agent Robert Dominguez, a Marfa native who is a supervisor in the Marfa Sector, says it takes time and commitment to get used to life out that way. It took him four years to memorize the landmarks and navigate the threatening desert and mountains. He still doesn’t know every nook and cranny. Many of the new agents and their families find the sector’s remoteness and isolation challenging, he says.

As agents have moved south, residents of the towns of Terlingua, Study Butte and Lajitas have had to adjust to more faces of authority. In the past, Border Patrol agents were few and far between along the river in and around Big Bend National Park. Mike Long, owner of the Desert Sports river tour shop in Terlingua, says that when he first moved out in 1986, he saw a Border Patrol car every few days. Now he sees several every day parked alongside the highway, occupied by young, bored-looking agents.

“We see them all over the place,” he says. “The new kids in the area don’t seem as approachable as the old agents.”

Line in the sand

Locals say their opinions about Border Patrol turned radically negative in 2002, when the three unofficial river crossings, called Class B ports of entry, were unexpectedly shut down. The crossings — one at Boquillas Canyon on the east end of Big Bend National Park, one at Santa Elena Canyon on the west side of the park and one at Lajitas about 15 miles further west — were used by locals in both Mexico and Texas to get to work and trade goods. Visitors to the area parks could take day trips to the hamlets across the river for a slice of rural Mexican culture. Though the crossings were officially closed in 1996, the new regulation wasn’t enforced until after 9/11. Now, residents must travel 300 miles east to Del Rio or 60 miles west to Presidio to cross the border at a port of entry.

Walker, who feels so safe in Terlingua that she doesn’t lock her doors, says the closings ended essential contact with the town’s Mexican neighbors. The Mexican villages relied on visitors from the United States filling their restaurants and small shops, and since 2002, many businesses have been abandoned.

“We stopped having that free communication, and when you limit access to each other, you begin to limit understanding, cooperation and coordination,” Walker says.

Many Terlingua residents say Border Patrol agents have fueled local resentment by stopping drivers without reason. They say agents have nothing better to do than harass the locals. Border Patrol spokesman Brooks counters that federal law requires agents to articulate their reasons for stopping drivers. They only pull people over, he says, for reasonable suspicion of a crime.

“I see them sitting around waiting for something to happen, waiting for a call,” says Cindy Burns, a Terlingua resident who works at Desert Sports. “The area is so harsh and unfriendly that they rarely got out of their air-conditioned cars.”

Burns, who says she makes an effort to wave to agents, says they don’t make much effort to improve their status in the community. “I think they know that they’re not well-liked, but you don’t see them having coffee and striking up conversation with the table next to them.”

Learning curve

Brooks says Marfa Sector agents are trying to improve their relationships in the tiny border communities. They’re planning open houses at their stations, where locals can learn more about the job. The Border Patrol has also recently acquired its own ambulances, which are available to the local emergency service stations to use when their own ambulances aren’t available, he says.

Greg Hennington, the chief of Terlingua Fire and EMS Services, a member of the Brewster County tourism council and the owner of Far Flung Outdoor Center in Terlingua, says he's had a long-standing positive relationship with Border Patrol. Agents have been on hand to help in emergency medical situations, and tourists visiting the Big Bend area have told him the multitude of agents make them more comfortable. "Their presence is more visible these days because of Sept. 11, but the world has changed," Hennington says. "[Terlingua Fire and EMS] have a 300-square-mile service area, and it's nice to have another set of hands around."

Hennington says he's worked closely with Border Patrol agents in Terlingua, Marfa and Alpine in the 17 years he's lived in the area and that he understands they have a job to do. "There's always a learning curve," he says.

Editor's Note: This story has been corrected to reflect an initial reporting error in the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the Marfa Sector. Citing security concerns, the agency initially declined to provide the specific number of agents assigned to the sector, but subsequently a Border Patrol spokesman said the number of agents increased by about 500 since 2006, and now there are about 700 agents in the Marfa Sector.

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Spring is here, though in New England it’s still a bit hard to tell except by the trees that have finally leafed and blossomed—and the start of Little League baseball. I’m sure the kids have been playing ball since February in Florida, but in New England we don’t get started until late April, and even then we typically have a lot of cold rainouts.

This is the first season in nine years that finds me neither managing nor coaching a team. Although I’ve approached seasons thinking I would just be a parent in the stands before, this time I feel sure I’ve passed the point where I might heed a call to fill in as a last-minute replacement. This definitive retirement is harder than I had anticipated, and I find my heart nostalgic for those earlier years when my son was little and his anticipated playing and my unexpected coaching were all in the future.

I remember looking forward to the day my son, greatly enamored of ball sports from age two, would be able to play Little League baseball. I had only become interested in baseball at age ten, and I had missed out on the Little League experience through living in small towns without a league until I was thirteen. By then it was time to move up to the next level, and, lacking the experience of the earlier years that all the other kids had, I was always one of the worst players on my teams.

I had not fulfilled my dream of becoming a good baseball player, even after hours of practicing alone, fielding balls bounced off my grandparents’ brick chimney and catching make-believe popups tossed as I high as I could make them go. Hitting fast pitching was impossible to learn on your own. I was glad to anticipate that my son would be able to get the full benefit of Little League coaching in the town we lived in. I had played catch with him and so on, but I was looking forward to having experienced coaches take him beyond what I could teach him.

We were lucky to live close to a park that included a Little League diamond. It didn’t meet the full Little League specifications, and the topography of the outfield was complex (hills and holes, irregular dimensions), but the field was adequate for local minor league play and far better than the vacant lot I had done my neighborhood playing on. It had an infield, home plate, and a pitching rubber, though no true mound. Our family had attended a couple of games there to see an older boy on our street play. People brought lawn chairs and blankets to sit on in outfield foul territory.

Over the years my son and I would spend many hours on this field, often just the two of us, doing fielding practice, hitting practice, and pitching practice. “Can we go to the park?” was a daily question of his to me during the baseball months for those years, and the answer was almost always yes. Later I would spend a lot of time there with my daughter working on her windmill pitching delivery for softball.

The first level of Little League is tee-ball, which takes kids as young as five. Tee-ballers in our section of town met in the aforementioned neighborhood park on Saturday mornings. Looking at the Little League rule book gives one the idea that tee-ball should basically consist of regular baseball games, only without pitchers, the batters hitting off a tee instead. In our town, there were no games at all. It was really just some practice in the basics of throwing and catching followed by extended batting practice from a tee.

Batting practice is the most boring activity for the player not batting at any level, but most hitters will make contact with the ball on the tee, which helps. On every ball that was hit, at least half a dozen fielders would try to be the first to get to the ball. There were numerous fathers (mainly) there shouting out technical reminders to their sons (mainly) from the sidelines. I avoided this, as it seemed both distracting and somewhat overbearing, however well-intentioned, though I watched to see how my son was doing and how he compared to the others just as attentively as the rest. Having had a weak throwing arm myself, I was glad to see that my son’s arm was among the best, as I had guessed it would be. Rules and positions were not being taught much to speak of, but the kids got caps and tee-shirts that gave them the feeling of being on a real team.

Despite the lack of games, my son loved tee-ball because he felt he was getting started in real baseball. He would dive for balls in the infield just as he had been diving for imaginary balls for almost as long as he’d been able to walk, mimicking the highlight plays he’d seen on television.

After two years of tee-ball we were definitely ready for something else though. We had hoped he could start minor league ball at age seven, but our league held fast to the eight-year-old minimum then in effect. They did, however, have planned an intermediate step for seven-year-olds, which, though part of the tee-ball program, was actually one in which the coaches pitched in something resembling real games.

Each baseball park run by the city was to have one or more traveling teams, so called because the teams would travel to all the parks in the city to play each other. It happened that our park didn’t have enough kids to field a traveling team and wouldn’t have had a coach for it anyway, so after a couple of weeks of getting the runaround at our old park, we were glad to get the go-ahead to go to another park and join its traveling team.

This was a larger park which contained two baseball diamonds, one Little League and one full-sized, arranged so that their deep outfields merged without a fence between them. The tee-ballers were in the big expanse of outfield, and the traveling team had the small diamond. Trish, who seemed to be in charge of the traveling team program, ran the park’s traveling team workouts for the first couple of weeks. The practices had pretty much been limited to batting practice with Trish or someone else pitching, at least since we’d arrived from our park. The third week Trish wasn’t there, so eventually one of the parents was enlisted to run the practice. It was not a good choice, though the guy had a heart of gold, I think, which became a problem in this instance.

Especially at the beginning level, there are going to be a few kids that have trouble hitting a pitched ball even when it’s being pitched to them for the sole purpose of being hit. One of the first hitters in that day’s batting practice was such a kid. Either his hand-eye coordination was below average, or he felt the pressure of having everyone watch him try to hit to an incapacitating degree. Swing and miss followed swing and miss. It was a painful experience for witnesses, but doubtless much worse for the two principals.

As the swing count rose, the kid had probably become exhausted as well, and he wasn’t coming any closer to making contact than he had been on the first pitch. It was like a nightmare of the I-can’t-get-out-of-this-loop type, which is the kind I sometimes have as I’m just waking up in the morning. Really, it must have been a sort of feedback loop, in which every pitch that was swung on and missed made the guy pitching all the more determined to give the kid one to hit, so he wouldn’t finish the session discouraged I guess. Or maybe he had it in his mind that every kid was to be alloted a certain number of hits. It was driving me nuts, but as I didn’t know the fellow pitching and was just a parent without any particular standing I felt obliged to just watch and hope. The time to end the week’s activity came with the unfortunate bat swinger still at the plate.

The combination of the late start and the long time spent on one kid who couldn’t hit the ball meant that the whole session had gone by without my son having so much as touched a ball or picked up a bat, and he could not have been the only one so deprived.

As we walked without speaking back to the car, I saw my son was near tears and angry. He, who had maintained his high spirits through those earlier tee-ball sessions, was now throwing down his glove in frustration and saying he was ready to quit. It was quite a shocking turn. I decided I would step forward to offer some advice (let the kid hit off a tee to finish?) if a similar situation arose in the future, no matter how awkward it might seem.

Next week Trish was again absent, and there was no equipment for the team either. I tossed out a ball we had brought with us just to get the boys started playing catch. At least everyone was going to touch the ball this week. As I surveyed the scene, a man I had never seen before approached from across the outfield. His face, which was shining with hope, made me think of a leprechaun. He came right up to me, and his very first words were “Will you coach this team?” He was the director of tee-ball I learned. Given the sorry state of the program and my son’s disenchantment with it, I was ready to view this as an opportunity. I saw another coaching candidate behind the backstop, a father of one of the other boys, and told him that I would coach if he would also. I don’t remember if we had so much as spoken to each other before; but he agreed after some heavy-duty coaxing.

I realized just how desperate the director must have been to find a coach when he told us we should gather at a spot across the field where the team would get shirts and caps for the team picture-taking. So the boys and their brand new rookie coaches (wearing team caps as well) had their team photo made, and no one would need to know exactly how long the coaches had been on the job. I was also somewhat stunned to hear that we had our first game coming up next week.

Knowing that practically nothing had been accomplished toward preparing them to play baseball in the previous weeks, I was afraid we would be embarrassed in a game and the boys would become demoralized. I told the team “We have a game next week,” and asked them “Are we ready for a game?” Thinking as an adult, I expected that they would sense their unpreparedness, start to feel the same anxiety I did, and hopefully say something like, “No way,” so I could say “OK, let’s get to work to make up for lost time.” Instead I got an enthusiastic “Yeah! Yeah!”—a bring-‘em-on this-is-what-we’ve-been-waiting-for sort of cheer, complete with leaps and pumping fists, led by an irrepressible kid named Michael.

This was a good reminder to me of what the main object of this program was—kids having fun playing baseball, not coaches running a major league development camp. I was glad they had misinterpreted my question as a call to get pumped up. I smiled and said all right, but I thought we needed to get ready, and we spent the rest of the time working on routine infield plays, running the bases, and hitting.

To become an official coach in the league you had to fill out an application of course, but also attend at least three league meetings, which were really just meetings of coaches. The meeting place was in the basement of the annex to a Catholic Church, whose name I hadn’t even heard before, even though it ran a school; which I mention to point out that, even though I had been living in my town for about fifteen years, my acquaintanceship with many of its institutions, not just Little League, was pretty limited. I eventually found the church and a place to park in the nearly full parking lot.

The room was packed and loud with animated talk, as attendance was always highest just as the season was getting started since coaches were chomping at the bit to get the go-ahead to start practices if teams had been selected or to find out when player tryouts and drafts would be if not. Schedules, equipment, and uniforms all had to be obtained. There was no league web site to convey information back then, so attending meetings was the way to find out what was going on.

I probably stood out a bit in the crowd, if only for my beard and longer-than-average hair. It was a very working class group. Some of the coaches came to meetings wearing their work uniforms. The word for the second person plural used by many in the group was “yous,” which I’m not sure I had encountered in person before, though it was obviously very common. I’d guess I was one of only a small percentage of the coaches in the room that had attended college. I should add that, while the population figure might indicate this was not a small town, among those born here there was a prevailing small-town-like mistrust of the outsider, meaning anyone that hadn’t grown up in the town and shared the same experience of school, church, and youth sports. Despite my fifteen years of residency, they were in a way right to view me as an outsider, if not to mistrust me.

I think most of the professional-class, college-educated people that had moved into town in large numbers during the past few years had put their kids (when they had kids) into the thriving soccer program instead of the declining baseball one. That may be worth writing about someday, but there was no way I was going to encourage one of my kids to play soccer, especially not in preference to baseball. So the love of baseball made me part of this baseball coaching fellowship, even if I might seem different from most of the others in some ways. I reckoned that in baseball savvy I was probably near the bottom.

The local Little League was not a welcoming organization. Though my fellow new coach and I received pro forma permission to take the field without having completed the meeting attendance requirements with the promise we would rectify the situation as soon as possible, not one person came up to us to say hello, glad to have you aboard or anything. I think it was mainly just an organizational culture that didn’t foster welcoming.

The first team we were up against was from the section of town that reputedly had the best teams most years. The coaches, a man and a woman, were of the very serious-about-winning type. They were preparing players for next year’s minor league teams, and of course they had sons on the team. Their main difference from me was that they had grown up in this town, knew Trish well, and were established insiders in youth sports, including hockey, which was as foreign to me and my son as cricket, since I had grown up in Texas and had never had a pair of ice skates on my feet.

The way the games went was that each coach pitched to his own team, while the coaches of the team in the field stood on the field as well, positioning players and giving tips on where to throw the ball in different situations and so on. Everyone in the complete batting order would bat once each inning, no matter how many outs had been recorded. Runners would advance around the diamond as in a real game (except there was no stealing), but the score would not be kept. That was the theory.

We were the home team, and Trish was on the scene, overseeing the proceedings. After the other team had batted through their order, they took the field, and I stepped to the pitching rubber. As soon as our leadoff hitter had gotten a bat, donned a helmet, and stepped to the plate, I delivered my first pitch, which was accompanied by shouts of “Hold on!” from the other team’s coaches, who had not completed the positioning of their defense. From the tone of their outcries, my failure to reckon how long these preparations might take was evidently an outrageous breach of etiquette or an imagined attempt to gain an advantage in a game with no scorekeeping, I’m not sure which. Startled as I was by the vehemence of the protests, I apologized for not having checked before pitching, but that was not sufficient.

The male coach had only one word to express his exasperation at my quick-pitch transgression: “Unbelievable!” I might have expected Trish to step in and say something like, “Just relax. Cut him some slack. It’s his first game. No harm done.” But what she said was quite different.

Trish spoke only to the coach, ignoring me: “This is what they’re sending me. I have to work with what I’ve got.” For all these years, right until I started writing about it, I had always viewed this comment of Trish’s as an expression of insider versus outsider hostility or an excessive deference to the other coach; but it has dawned on me that there may have been some hurt feelings involved that I wasn’t aware of, and hadn’t considered, which would somehow make her comment easier to take. I can imagine that Trish may have been expecting to coach our team herself but had discovered the job had been stripped from her.

And that “unbelievable” expression of disgust at my incompetence might have been spoken partly in solidarity with Trish, who could have painted us as usurpers to the other coaches before the game. But that’s just speculation. The sure fact is that the league was not in very good shape, and insulting new volunteers was not helpful.

Whatever the motives for the decidedly unfriendly comments, I shook them off and let the coaches get their defense set; then I proceeded to pitch strikes to our hitters, which was the best answer I could have come up with since most of our guys could hit. Our team thoroughly outplayed the other one. Even though we were not keeping an official score, it goes without saying that the players were keeping track of how many runs had crossed the plate for each team.

After the game had ended and I was lugging the equipment bag to the car, another car pulled up alongside mine. Michael, his face glowing, had something he was bursting to say: “We dominated them!” Non-competitive games for kids only appeal to grownups, I’ve found.

According to the kids on our team—and I really didn’t keep score or encourage them to—we “won” every game we played that year, which is believable. Just by chance, we had a lot of future all-stars on that team. The season was over when school finished in late June, but I hated to have that be the end. One of the parents knew a coach who would keep his Little League team’s equipment for the summer and let us use it. We agreed to keep meeting every Saturday morning, so long as we had enough to play with four or five on a side. We got together almost every week during the summer, unofficially of course, and with a few extras (a little brother, a big brother, a couple of friends) each time. I know we formed tighter bonds and learned more baseball because of those extra weeks.

I coached most of the boys on the traveling team at least one or two times more, either on all-star teams or regular Little League teams. I still have the ball they signed and presented to me back then when they could barely print their names. The ink has faded, but the memory of who and how they were has not.

The boys on the team are sixteen now, young men really. Though a number of them have moved to other towns, I still see some of them and their parents from time to time, occasionally at school events, but most often at baseball games, now high school or Senior Little League. I don’t know how frequently I’ll see the boys once they have graduated, but I hope enough to tell how they are faring in life. I should add that, as I put in my time in the coaching ranks, I became accepted by the other coaches and gained their respect. There’s no denying that it helped that my son and daughter became known as good players and that teams I managed won a few city championships.

Coaching Little League baseball and, later, softball (when my daughter decided, to my delight, that she wanted to play) became an important part of my life, a totally unexpected one, and it all started when a desperate tee-ball director approached me from across a green field teeming with five-to-seven-year-olds to give me the call I hadn’t realized I was waiting for. I suppose one can look at any unexpected turning point in one’s life as being due to fate or providence, depending on one’s outlook on life and the cosmos, but this one has really stuck in my mind.

I knew I liked teaching baseball to my son, but I discovered I liked to teach other kids as well. Little League involvement also changed my relationship to the community, as it gave me a role in the daily lives of people and their children to a degree that I would never have had otherwise. Thinking about what I’ve done in my life that’s not strictly family related, I’m not sure that Little League coaching doesn’t seem the most significant.

Tags: baseball, Coaching, Little League

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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Posted by nasaaryu86 on Oct 11th, 2010 in Blog, The Simpsons | 0 comments

Lisa starts coaching Bart’s Little League team; Marge and Bart spend the day at an amusement park, where former MLB manager Mike Scioscia gives Bart advice.

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