Little league baseball doesn’t cast a long shadow over this town.
Summer is too short and the game requires landscaping, an art yet to arrive in the North. A regulation pitcher’s mound and a grass infield are luxuries our tiny ballplayers only dream about.
They play on gravel, a Field of Screams where a hot grounder reaches critical velocity on its way into centerfield. OSHA would make all our infielders wear catcher’s masks.
Our kids play anyway, but then the salmon return in mid-July, starting a mad rush to put away fish and money. Baseball slinks off the scene kind of sheepishly.
Still I was sad to watch the season finale two weeks ago when the Braves topped the Giants.
Our little league has rebounded in recent years, and that’s a good thing. Soccer, a virus that teaches kids all the wrong lessons, was threatening to catch on here. We nipped that in the bud.
Baseball introduces every skinny, nine-year-old kid to life’s complexities, such as where, exactly, is the strike zone? You can advance to scoring position by hitting the ball or just by standing still through four pitches? Or by being hit by the hall?
Our nation is in decline because a generation was taught that you could succeed by kicking an inflatable ball into a 24-foot-wide net. In the real world, the target is small, the ball is a rock and there are many complicated, sometimes contradictory rules decided by an umpire whose call on a critical play you will rehash every day. For the rest of your life.
Just like in the workplace, baseball puts you on a team with strangers and leaves you wondering what the hell the others do. Take Ernie, out in right field. He’s picking up rocks, throwing them in the air, and catching them in his mitt. Or he’s studying bugs. It doesn’t matter.
You’re angry at Ernie for screwing off and hurting your team’s chances and then you chat him up and realize that Ernie is exactly where he needs to be, approximately one light year away from the ball. Ernie and the ball will likely never meet and you become grateful for that. You start finding bugs to show Ernie.
Down at home plate is Grady. A kid called Grady is always the catcher because the catcher must play in 50 pounds of gear, plus a mask, squatted an inch behind a swinging bat and in front of an umpire whose breath stinks. Only Grady could pull this off. Also, Grady knows the batting average of every kid on the opposing team, which bad pitches each batter will chase, and when to remind his dad to change the oil in the minivan.
Later in life, Grady will repair the heat shield on the space shuttle during a mid-flight spacewalk using only an expired credit card and a Chapstick. He will receive zero credit for this. Like Our Savior, Grady was born to be punished for his good works.
Out on the mound is Yates or Champ or Lance or some other son-of-a-coach who will start on the All-Start team or his dad will kill him. Champ hates baseball almost as much as he hates his dad, but he has a bazooka for a right arm. Champ and Grady are friends insomuch as that between them, they do 80 percent of the team’s actual work.
Also, there is a shortstop named Scoots. No other sport has anything like a shortstop. The position was invented because every town in America has a kid who can’t stop moving or talking. He’s the shortstop. Scoots is chomping gum and kicking dirt and chatting up the pitcher and reminding the bug-watchers in the infield what to do on the next play while working on the line he’ll use on the cute redhead at the concession stand.
Years from now, when you’re at the neighborhood tap bemoaning your pending divorce and sure your life is ruined, Scoots will appear and convince you that you’re a great guy on the rebound, and then skip out of the joint after getting the barmaid’s phone number.
You will rediscover your will to live.