You probably know the cliché of the overly enthusiastic mother at the ballfield, the one in the sequined “Baseball mom” t-shirt, screaming at the umpires from the bleachers, just barely avoiding being ejected from the game for her overly ebullient reactions. The mother with the totebag with the baseball seam appliqués, full of snacks and Gatorade. I am not her.
I try to like baseball. I really do. My husband loves it, as do a lot of men and some women in my life. Both of my sons have played. My oldest got in a few years until he realized he could simply say “no, I don’t want to play.” But my youngest is more enthusiastic about it. He plays rec league every year and was on the middle school team this year.
So, like it or not, I am a frequent spectator of baseball. Dutifully, I lug my fake Stanley cup of ice water and my folding camp chair to each game, and set up along the first baseline to watch 5 to 7 innings of tween/young teen ball. I try my best to follow along and cheer at the appropriate times. I’ve gotten better at it over the years; I no longer look up from my day dream to find my son is at bat and I’ve already missed his first strike. I pay more attention now.
It’s not that I hate baseball; in some ways I have grown to enjoy it, though that has more to do with my child than with the sport itself. But I admit that I don’t really like it. Baseball on TV? Why yes, I could use a nap, thank you. I simply don’t understand the nuances, my husband says. ‘Tis true. Do not try to explain the in-field fly rule to me because my face is going to glaze over and all I’m going to say is that is nonsensical bullspit and my kid was wronged. Hubs rolls his eyes, mumbles something about it being a thinking man’s sport and moves on.
Don’t get me wrong though; I will cheer loudly and enthusiastically for my own son when he hits that ball, which he might do once per game, or makes a play in right field. Because the thing is, despite playing every summer for the last 7 or so years, despite two years of weekly private pitching and hitting lessons, despite dragging his dad to the cage or the field on his off days, my baby just is not that great of a player. If heart, effort, and determination were all it took, he’d be signing with the Astros by the time he gets out of high school. Unfortunately, he is my son, and inherited from me a “generally bad at sports” gene that is hard to overcome.
I’m sorry, kid, your inability to make contact with that ball, or when you drop a ball that you should’ve had, that’s all me. Just ask Mr. Securro.
He was my elementary school gym teacher. He was also the local high school baseball coach, which meant that every day that was nice outside, gym class was a game of wiffle ball. I shudder just thinking back. First was the humiliation of “picking teams”, in which it came down to me or the fat kid. I was still last, quite often. I think I hit that stupid plastic ball with the stupid plastic bat maybe three times in 6 years of grade school. And as for playing defense, well, I didn’t have a clue. No one really told me what to do, so I just stood there looking around. If a ball ever did come my way I wouldn’t know what to do with it. When I did somehow end up with it in my hand and someone yelled to me where to throw it, an over-handed 6 foot arc was the best I could do. So it was no mystery why I was picked last, but it hurt. And the jeers of my classmates, frustrated with my athletic deficiencies, stung worse than a wiffle ball to the back of the head.
Kids have not changed much, and when my son makes an error or strikes out looking (that’s a baseball term I have learned! It means not swinging the damn bat), his teammates are not shy about letting him know he has let them down. It’s subtle enough to avoid the coach getting involved, but a disappointed “come ONNNN” from the dugout is sufficient.
My son just rolls with it; it makes me want to hide my head. I remind myself it’s not about me, it is not 1989, this is not wiffle ball with Mr. Securro. My boy shrugs it off and keeps trying. He knows he can hit it – he hits bomb after bomb at the batting cages – and has a pitching PR of 73mph. He just keeps trying. The boy loves baseball, even if he’s not the best on the team.
He will be moving on to high school next year, and chances are he may not even make the team, not even JV. If they chose kids by effort and hard work, he would. But that’s not how the world works. Results get noticed, not grit or work ethic.
I am still so very proud of him. But baseball is not his talent; art is his talent. Enjoy his latest entries to the county art show:
Nevertheless, as middle school ends and summer league starts, I’ll be there cheering for him like the MLB scouts are in town. I am a baseball mom. Just not that baseball mom.
I think it’s great that you’re out there and even better that your son goes out for nothing more than love of the game, even if he isn’t the best. My older son is a couple years behind yours, and is a sports fanatic. We do flag football (mainly because tackle is too much of a commitment for everyone), basketball, swimming, and yes he is now on a ‘travel’ baseball team. He is one of the better performers (for now anyway) and I’d like to see him do something through high school mainly as an alternative to screens but I have no delusions of grandeur or expectations of anything beyond fun or exercise.
The only thing I ever given him a hard time for is attitude and effort when it is lacking. It sounds like your son already has that lesson covered and it will serve him well in whatever he does.
Better you than me on the travel team stuff! I put my foot down there when hubby mentioned it. Way too much of a time and money commitment, and around here it is extremely competitive, meaning parents act like fools. I don’t want anything to do with that.
I would like my son to keep playing through high school, just don’t know if they’re going to let him.
The thing is, he is capable of being really good! We see it at his weekly lessons and practice. But he gets in a game and seems to forget everything he’s learned. He’s really good at standing by the plate and letting the ball go by him without swinging at it, which is really the only time my hubby (also coach) really gets on him.
Better you than me on the travel team stuff! I put my foot down there when hubby mentioned it. Way too much of a time and money commitment…
Try fencing. If a kid is going to try to be competitive at the world level (eg, make the Olympic team), international travel is mandatory. Not only is there not enough talent in the US, you need to gain some experience with the fencers (and referees) from other countries you’ll be competing against.
I met a couple once whose daughter’s dream was to make the US Olympic foil team. She had the talent. The parents took out a second mortgage on their house to get the money to deal with the finances…
Fencing was interesting… my boys both earned their E rating by winning tournaments in Charlottesville — it was wild to see them as ‘kids’ 14+ fencing grown-ups, boys, girls, ladies, barmaids, henchmen, and at least one professor.
Their club was anchored by a family with three boys all of whom had B ratings and were striving for invitations to the right tournaments to get their A’s and invitations to Olympic try-outs.
The effort to get an E seemed a lot; the effort to get a B/A seemed impossible.
As for order and efficiency of the tournaments? I was impressed.
If you get to an A rating is it legal to punch your opponent in the jaw with the pommel, like a true swashbuckler?
Heh, they have an actual swashbuckler category: Saber.
You can be absolutely terrible with no rating and swash that thing around as much as you want.
Getting an initial E in local tournaments is a matter of fencing in enough of them. At some point you have a day when there’s an unexpected extra so more classifications are awarded, you’re having a good day, that person who always has your number is knocked out early, etc. I got my E when there were a couple last minute additions with the right ratings and it became a D event with multiple E’s also awarded.
The mixed groups at that level are fun. I got back into fencing in my mid-50s. In the local tournaments I seemed to come up against a 14-year-old girl regularly and always beat her narrowly. Once I was watching her in a bout and her father came up beside me. “She hates you,” he said (with a smile). “That’s because I’m six inches taller, so my longer arms give me reach and my longer legs let me control distance, and I take every advantage I can from that. She’s faster than I am, she’s more accurate than I am, and in another year she’ll figure it out and mop the strip with me.” A few years later she went off to one of the Ivy League schools on a fencing scholarship.
I could occasionally push a C fencer if I was having a good day. I could occasionally fool a B fencer. Any touches I scored against an A, they gave me. I once fenced some warm-up epee with an 84-year-old man who had been on one of the eastern European Olympic teams (I don’t know how he ended up at a club in Lincoln, NE). His legs were such that he had to stand in one place. If I screwed up at all he hit me in the wrist or forearm. Lethally fast, at 84.
I was on the executive committee for Colorado fencing for five years, so from time to time I was on the bout committee for tournaments, or sometimes the armorer. Having the tournament come off properly is a point of pride. No one wants to run a tournament where people complain that it was slow or sloppy.
Quite. Everything you say was something I saw one way or another. I mean, not the 84 yo ninja, but all ages and skills that didn’t always fit the build or expectations from outward appearances. I was glad we could get a taste of that experience for a few years… it’s an excellent sport. I regret that I only dabbled in it… the exercise was much better than a gym.
I tried to get my small college president friend to adopt Fencing as their primary sport for all the reasons you cite plus the fact that individuals with talent can climb the ladder at tournaments independent of how the team might fare.
A perfect club sport for a tiny college with no budget for college athletics. Alas, he did not take my recommendations.
Like March said below baseball is a really hard sport. I played as a kid and was never very good, though my wife’s uncle played in college and made it into the Orioles minor league system before washing out. If my kids have any talent in the gene pool it is definitely coming from her side not mine.
Last Friday they did a little event at UMD for the travel team where they got to go on the field during the national anthem. Now, Maryland is not good and proceeded to get rocked by Rutgers but I will say watching the level of play at even a D1 school was far from the near flawless product you see on any given MLB game.
But yea be happy for skipping the travel team. Every time I think I’m done paying for it something else comes in. I think we’d all be better off if all of the parents involved made a pact to stop the madness and play only with our local little league and/or boys and girls club type teams. Most of us are doing that too anyway.
The fee to join a travel team around here is over $1000, sometimes well over depending on the team. Then there are tournament entry fees, gate fees, the costs of travel, etc…. and being at the field from early morning until it’s dark outside? No. Just absolutely not.
Baseball is a tough sport at the individual level: it’s always you against the ball. And the ball is engaged in a conspiracy to make you look bad. Worse than golf where the ball is simply fickle and indifferent to your desires.
Baseball was funny in that some kids who weren’t that good loved to play while some kids who were good or even very good couldn’t handle the stress of failure. There was a good line in Moneyball to the effect that at some point in every kid’s career they are told they can’t play anymore… we’re just never entirely sure when we’ll reach that point.
The kid who is the star among my son’s age group – best pitcher, a phenom running bases (hits a single, next thing you know you look up and he’s on third base), etc – has had to be relieved from the mound because he couldn’t stop crying when he was having a bad outing. They’re 14. Easy to forget they are just babies, I felt so bad for him. He’s really, really talented but yes, he can’t handle the stress of failure. My son gets upset with himself but to a much lesser degree. He just asks to increase his private lesson to twice a week (no) and drags his dad to the cages more often.
If he doesn’t make the high school team, this year or next might be that point where he’s not able to play any more. There’s a senior rec league, but by that age (15+) most kids have either lost interest or are on the high school team and take the summer off so there are never enough kids for a team.
Yeah, I had more fun ‘practicing’ baseball with my friends – batting cage, pepper, 500, running bases, all of it – than I did ‘playing’ baseball. Hours and hours of ground balls, fly balls, and made-up games. Those were fun. Standing in the sun mentally calculating the right plays *if* the ball was hit to you, and if it was on the ground, in the air, or to your right vs. to your left? Would rather have my idiot friends playing with the jug machine to see if we could hit the ball before it hit us.
Once we all got serious in HS, the pick-up games ended and there was never really anything like it again until softball leagues… which never really scratched the itch I had for baseball. If he likes softball? Then he’s set for life!
I disagree with you about golf. The golf ball often conspires with the club, much the same way the baseball is in on the massive and frankly overt joint effort to show up the batter. In both sports, though, the equipment periodically tells you, “You couldn’t hit water if you fell out of a boat.”
The summer after I was in eighth grade my parents bought me a junior membership at the course in the tiny town a few miles over from where we lived. Unlimited play. The course was empty during the day (except Tuesday morning, Ladies’ Day). My dad would drop me off about three mornings a week on his way out of town (he was a traveling field auditor and safety inspector for an insurance company). I could play 18 holes in the morning, eat lunch, and play another 18 in the afternoon. From time to time I would hit a miserable shot and when I turned around, the old club pro was there in his (silent) electric golf cart. “Want to know why it went wrong?” he would ask. There followed a 10-15 minute lesson. Among the things I learned that summer is it’s NEVER the equipment’s fault. It’s your fault. And you have to put it behind you and hit the next shot properly.
As I’m sure you inferred, my comment was tongue-in-cheek.
Heh, well I was trying to keep the conspiracy to human agents manipulating the ball, but I’ll acknowledge the possibility that golf is inhabited by spirits, faeries, and/or demons who manipulate the ball, the club, the wind, the slope of the green and every other element involved.
I’ve been a golfer since I was a freshman in high school (Night Fever was topping the charts for reference). It’s always amazed me how difficult it is to hit a ball that isn’t moving well enough to keep it in the same fairway.
Consider that from the top of the backswing, you have to accelerate the clubhead to 80-90 mph at a particular position. Margin for error on position is roughly ±1 cm vertically, ±2 cm horizontally. Angular error of a few degrees on the club face direction. Similar error for the rotation of the club face. A modern golf swing is a very unnatural motion. Most of the unusual features are intended to make that kind of positioning accuracy repeatable.
Good to have you back, Em, but what’s a “fake Stanley cup” and how can you tell? Does someone make knockoffs of the genuine Stanley product? I don’t see the business opportunity.
It’s just a travel mug that’s vaguely the same size and shape as a Stanley, also insulated, but not made by Stanley. It’s not really a “fake”- it doesn’t purport to be a Stanley, just looks similar. Quite a bit cheaper.
Congrats Em, I’m of the opinion that artistic talent is considerably more useful than skill at sportsball. And based on those pics your kiddo’s got the knack.
The little known 11th Circle of Hell is watching 9 year olds try to play a baseball game on a Wednesday evening in March in the Northeast.
That year when the kids begin pitching is just brutal for all for participants, but especially the parents forced to watch.
When I played ball with friends and schoolmates as a kid, the difference between me and the kids who’d been getting skills and practice for many years already was very, very obvious. It’s not that I was unaware of how to swing, or that I was much worse than anyone else at throwing, and once above a certain age I lost my fear of the ball and acquired some reaction skills to catch it, ultimately getting decent enough at it that I’d be put at third base sometimes (if, as was often the case, whoever was assigning positions just plain had to make some hard choices on defense because the number of good kids on each team was limited).
But the kids who’d been getting training and coaching since showing up for T-ball at age 4 were SO MUCH BETTER. You could just tell when they stepped up to the plate, whether they made contact or not, they knew what they were doing. Their MUSCLES knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t have the ability to articulate it verbally.
My son has great mechanics! But he also has a tendency to just… watch the ball go by. He’s been taking more swings this season and has found that swinging actually results in contact with the ball more often than not swinging.
He can pitch really well when he follows all the steps he’s been taught, but his body doesn’t always cooperate.
As for defense… he plays right field. I recently heard a comedian say that if your 7 or 8yo little leaguer is always put in right field, take a hint.
It’s from long ago, but my own experience says an enormous amount depends on getting the right coaches. There wasn’t t-ball at that time, so we didn’t start until some of us were big enough to pitch. My first two years were fairly miserable. Before my third year, the school district had hired someone who had gone fairly high in the minor leagues before he decided to teach history. He signed up to be a coach. Each year there was a draft of sorts to assign kids to teams. The new coach said, “Just give me the kids no one else wants.” He banned assistant-coach dads who wouldn’t do things his way and really taught us. Also moved people all over the place on defense. I sucked in the outfield where other coaches put me; but I could play second base just fine once someone was teaching me how to play there.
My dad always said it was amazing to see the kids no one else wanted start winning. And develop swagger. The team that had all the real jocks — their asshole coach had bullied the other coaches to accumulate them — that everyone knew would win the league did win. They beat us losers 4-3 in the championship game.
Oh I like this guy!