Little League

I volunteered to coach a Little League team this year.  I don't have a kid or anything.  I don't know why I signed up.  At the time I must have been drunk.

It is strange, as a sports fan, when you reach a certain age, and you notice that the players entering the leagues with great fanfare and promise are the same age as you.  And then the league slowly fills with your peers.  And then they start to describe players your age as "peaking physically."  You may or may not be employed at this moment.  And then they begin to describe players your age as "leaving their primes."  Eventually, I'm sure, although it hasn't happened to me just yet, these same players you've aged with will be declared to have "lost a step," and then shortly thereafter to be "finished," at which point they will then be guided into retirement by their impatient fans and bosses and by wave after wave of younger, fresher, more promising players.  And it will be difficult to avoid imagining yourself as also somehow finished, or spent, or newly worthless, with your own life stretching idly before you for another maybe 60 years.  This uncanny effect of premature obsolescence is magnified for the observer of Little League Baseball.

They gave me the Twins.  All the teams were named after real Major League teams.  There were Tigers and Rangers and Diamondbacks and Astros.  My kids were disappointed -- they noted that Twins were the least cool and tough team nickname in our Little League.  I pointed out that Minneapolis and St. Paul are known as the "Twin Cities," and so the nickname "Twins" is a source of local pride to fans.  They said, ok, but we don't live in Minnesota.

I ran the kids through some drills.  I looked up drills on the internet.  We did some hitting off a tee and some fielding grounders and some baserunning drills.  That seemed like enough.  A couple kids wanted to pitch, that seemed fine.

We lost our first game 2-1.  We lost our second game 4-0.  We lost our third game 8-1.  By our fourth game, our opponents were scoring in the double digits.  By our sixth game, they were topping 20 runs.  The most we scored was three -- the opposing pitcher hit a couple batters and threw some wild pitches and started choking on swallowed tears on the mound.  We only lost that one by 18.

I tried everything.  I put our sluggers in the middle of the lineup to give them the most RBI opportunities -- our sluggers were the kids who could hit it out of the infield once in a while.  I put our high OBP kids in the first and second spots to set the table -- our high OBP kids were the ones who were too scared to take the bats off their shoulders and so they got to first when the pitchers couldn't throw a strike.  We practiced twice as much as every other team; we showed up to games exhausted and wanted to quit halfway through.  I cancelled all practices; infielders and outfielders alike kept crashing into each other or letting pop flies fall undisturbed, like they'd never seen a diamond before.

The problem was that we didn't have any high-character leaders who could inspire the group with their tough, gritty, never-quit play.  The other problem was that they didn't know how to play baseball and I didn't know how to manage them.

Our ninth game was against the team we'd played in the first game.  I thought we had a real chance to turn things around here -- they'd only beaten us 2-1 the first time.  But they had a couple players who'd been sick for that game, I guess.  They were the first ones to top 40 against us.

I asked my priest for guidance.  The kids were losing their spirit.  Several of our fatter players had already quit.  He said that many important values could be strengthened through the process of losing.  I asked him for an example.  Well, he said, one might gain a more accurate understanding of one's own weaknesses.  I brought that to the kids at the next practice but it didn't seem to help them.

Our best player, David, he quit not long after that.  He claimed he had tendinitis or something and couldn't play.  He showed up the next week on the Marlins, laughing and cheering, giving out high fives to his new teammates.  Wouldn't make eye contact with any of us.  You're not supposed to be able to poach players in Little League, so I complained to the umpire, but he threatened to throw me out and the other manager just grinned at me.  David knocked in 8 RBI against us in the first three innings for his new team.  After that I told our pitcher to throw at him.  I thought we needed to take a stand; I thought it would buoy my kids -- I thought we'd been through enough.  Our pitcher missed wildly though and threw four pitches about ten feet over everyone's head, straight into the backstop, then he yelped in pain and grabbed his elbow and let his arm dangle, limp and swelling.  David ended up stealing second on the next pitch, then stole third and scored after our catcher hurled the ball into deep left-centerfield trying to throw him out.  The kid I told to bean him won't be able to throw a ball for the rest of his life, the doctors say.

We kept our last game close.  4-0.  It was right in the heart of summer, the other team only had seven players.  They only had one kid in the outfield until they realized we never hit it out there anyway, so they played most of the game with an extra infielder and no one past the dirt.  We did a bunch of bunting which didn't do anything except piss off the other manager, which was enough.  After the game was over I handed out little certificates and awards to the kids.  They were all condescending, "Best Hustle," "Best Attitude," "Best Heads-Up Play," "Least Complaints."  With every one I handed out they looked more and more upset.  They kept expecting me to pull one last certificate, the one that would make it ok, that would be something beautiful, forged from their suffering.  They just wanted their miserable season to be over.  We were alone on the empty field -- the other team had already left.  The parents were milling around near the bleachers, waiting for me to wrap it up so they could go home.

There was no lesson, no beauty.  There was no greater truth to behold, no better version of ourselves we could now become.  Sometimes in the world, you lose and lose and lose, and when it's over and you reassess, you realize that all that happened is you lost, and now you're in a worse place than you were before.  Even learning that is not a lesson.  Even that is just another loss.