There IS Crying in Baseball

We survived opening day. I could snarkily claim that it’s taken me until now to recover; but, that wouldn’t be accurate. I’ve been trying to reestablish our grass. Which is threatening to become a yearly chore.

But I digress. Opening day is a somewhat drawn out affair. There are 6 levels of play: T-ball, coach pitch baseball, coach pitch softball, the minors for baseball, minors for softball, and finally majors for baseball. There aren’t enough girls to field a majors team for softball. At least not this year.

For T-ball and coach pitch there are 3 teams a-piece, something less than that for the majors and the minors. On Opening Day, all of the players on all the teams get introduced and run out onto the field. Where they have to stand around and wait for the league organizers to thank all the sponsors, helpers, volunteers, politicians and who ever else might have tangentially contributed to something related to the Little League. Don’t get me started on the guy who decided to “sing” the National Anthem. Really- don’t get me started.

Wanna guess how well the younger kids are able to wait through all of that?

In retrospect, the lass’ introduction was a harbinger of things to come. The announcer totally botched our last name when he introduced her. She didn’t take kindly to that. At all. Unfortunately for the announcer, he had to butcher our name a few more times since I was introduced as an assistant coach for both the teams and the boy was introduced for his team. The lass was to busy wallowing to notice and realize it was nothing personal.

Further complicating things was the schedule, which had the boy and the lass playing ball at the same time, on complete opposite sides of the fields. I started with the lass, who started out on defense. The one time a ball came in her direction, she put her glove down and whiffed. The ball went right between her legs. By the time she turned around and got back to where the ball was, most of her teammates had swarmed the area with more efficiency than a SWAT team on a drug bust. When the dust had settled, the ball was not in the lass’ hands. The whole experience upset her greatly. So yes, there’s crying in T-Ball.

After the lass’ team finished their stint in the field, it was out to the boy’s game. I missed his at-bat, but got there in time to watch him in the field. He played 3rd base. Believe it or not, fielding isn’t a problem for him so much as knowing what to do after he’s fielded the ball. The diamond is a regulation little league sized one so he can’t make a throw from third to first. But he also was quickly flummoxed by base runners and who he should try to get out and what to do with the ball. To make matters worse, the second time he got up to bat, he tried to turn a single into a double and got thrown out at second base. He was ready to quit after that. And yes, there’s crying in coach pitch.

He wasn’t alone though. Another boy almost lost it because he didn’t know he was supposed to run all the way around the bases as the last hitter. Yes- all the coaches told him he was supposed to. Apparently the instructions didn’t register. When we finally got him around to third, he was on the verge of losing it; imploring that “no one had told him to run the bases.” Sigh. Luckily, we were able to reign him in and settle him down when we explained it was OK. And there was another teammate who didn’t even bother to take the field for some mysterious reason. I didn’t want to know at that point.

I never did get to see the lass hit. I was too late getting back over to her game from helping out with her brother’s game. The Wife didn’t get there in time either- the lass was already on 1st when she’d arrived. The Wife didn’t start to cry, thankfully. But it was close. If she had, I think I would’ve done so as well just to get in on the action. You know, just throw myself on the ground and start thrashing. Cathartic.

Opening Day was over by 11:30. At that point, the kids were running around playing and the Wife and I were hanging out talking to some of the other parents. We even had a little of the lunch that we’d brought thinking we’d be there a lot longer. We were glad it worked out that way. It had been long enough.