Play Ball

Freud said once that it’s not just two people in bed, it’s six: you and your partner, your parents, and your partner’s parents.  It’s a bed crowded with ghosts.

Little League baseball fields seem to me versions of the same thing. Those little boys and girls aren’t on the fields with just themselves, oh no. They’re out there with the ghosts of their parents’ childhoods, with their parents' dreams for their kids - and of course, the kids' own dreams about becoming the next fill-in-name-of-favorite-ballplayer-here.

Liam has been playing in little league since t-ball, in kindergarten. He’s just finished third grade and, I’m hoping, his baseball career may be over. He got bored standing in the outfield during the interminable innings when the eight-year-old batters try to hit the balls flung at them by eight-year-old pitchers; he hated that he couldn’t hit the ball hard enough to get it out of the infield; and his perfectionist nature was easily riled by his mistakes. Of course, he didn’t like to practice, either, so most of those mistakes plagued him for the entire season. His explanation? "Soccer is my real passion, mommy,” he said to me one day after a game, as we walked in the rain to the bus.

Now who knows if that statement will prove true, but if soccer gets him out of Little League, I’m all for it: youth soccer is fast, played within a set time limit (1 hour, as opposed to the sometimes 2 ½ hour baseball games), and at the end of the game the kids are exhausted, not just bored.

If you live on the East Side of Manhattan and your kid plays little league, you probably play ball on a set of fields that are bordered on one side by the on-ramp to the FDR and on the other by the ConEd smokestacks. Pastoral, it ain't. Adding to our not-quite-bucolic joy in America's pastime this spring, as any New Yorker could tell you, is the endless, endless, endless rain. We spent hours standing in the rain watching the players’ white baseball pants slowly turn the same color as the tan muck of the base-running paths. (Could we just pause for a minute to contemplate the genius who decided that white baseball pants were the best choice for eight-year olds’ uniforms? I think we used an entire bottle of stain remover on those pants over the course of this season, and after the final game had to just toss them out.)

Liam’s team ultimately won the championship – but his team got to the championship game because of a controversial call in the previous game. In that game, Liam’s team was winning by one run, in the last inning, when the other team hit a gorgeous home run: a solid thud of the bat, the ball soaring into the evening air (miraculously not raining), and the kid started to trot around the bases, a look of pure pleasure (and amazement) on his young face. As the kid rounded third, we heard his coach say “you didn’t touch second, go back!” but the kid didn’t hear him and continued home. Meanwhile, Liam’s coach yelled at his players to tag second base, thus effectively getting the kid out, because he hadn’t touched the base.  It fell to the second-base umpire to make the call...and he said the kid was out, so Liam’s team won the game.

Now, technically, yes, the kid was out; he didn’t touch the base and missed it by a wide enough margin that his own coach noticed. On the other hand, it was a glorious hit and if Liam’s coach hadn’t demanded that his kids make the play at second and then demanded that the umpire call the play, probably no one would've done anything, the game would've been tied, and who knows what would've happened. 

Opinion on both teams was pretty evenly divided about this play, actually, with some parents taking the “hey, that’s the breaks of the game” attitude, and some thinking that Liam’s coach was way too invested in WINNING. 

I’m not sure what I thought about the whole thing; I just know that during the screaming match that followed, when a parent marched onto the field to insist that the wrong call had been made, it was almost as if I could see the ghosts of Little Leaguers past, floating around the bases, and the ghosts of their parents, screaming on the sidelines.

Like I said, it’s a crowded game.

This is an original post to the NYC Moms Blog. When Deborah Quinn isn't watching Little League games or dodging rain drops, she also blogs at MannahattaMamma.