Play ball!

It's baseball season again.

I hate baseball season.

I didn't use to. But then, baseball season meant rooting for teams with players whose average height was something over 58 inches. And who were older than my television set.

I am a bad Little League mom. Not bad in the psycho-baseball parent sense (those tend to be dads anyway; the psycho-moms tend to be in sports like skating); bad in the clueless and unenthusiastic sense.

Clueless because I don't play catch with my kids to develop their skills because I can't. I can catch okay, but as far as throwing... let's just say that if the fate of the free world depended upon me being able to throw a baseball and hit, oh, the broad side of a barn, we'd all be toast. (Oddly enough, I can be quite accurate with a set of car keys. Go figure.)

Batting is no better. Three years ago, the coaches on one of my kids' teams had the parents take batting practice, to boost the morale of the kids. Most of the parents were mediocre -- certainly not as good as the kids, which was the point of the whole exercise -- but I was execrable. I could not hit it when pitched to me, no matter how gently or skillfully. I couldn't even hit it more than a few feet off of a bloody tee.

Not very enthusiastic because, try as I might, I have a hard time being cheerful about sitting around freezing my ass off and watching a bunch of nine- to twelve-year-olds run around. Even when one of them is mine. No matter how much I love the kid.

It is a little known meteorological fact, but Little League ballparks in the San Francisco Bay Area are an average of ten degrees colder than adjacent land. Or maybe it just seems that way. At any rate, when it is 59 degrees, with probably a good 5 extra degrees off for wind chill, not cheering at every strikeout becomes difficult.

I've been involved in Little League for nine years now. I've never been a team parent, or a coach, or anything but a parent. I do my part as far as team snacks, and I'm fine about working the concessions stand, but that's it. I also will volunteer to keep score, because I actually know how to keep a baseball scorecard, which fewer and fewer parents seem to know how to do. And you know what? I've never regretted not being more involved. Bad mom, bad, bad mom. At this year's opening day ceremonies, people like me were sternly lectured by the league president about how this was not day care and that the league couldn't operate without parent volunteers. Wait, you mean it would have to fold? Can I organize a boycott?

It could be worse. At least I'm not a Little League psycho-parent. Although I have had the pleasure of working with lovely people as coaches, and sharing teams with generally responsible adults, there have been a few episodes of behavior (almost always on the part of people on other teams) that have made me just cringe, and say "I would never do anything like that."

Only once, though, was I ever sorely tempted to kick someone. There was a boy on a team with one of my sons whom I had never liked much. He was an angry little boy, and as my son often caught the brunt of the anger, I was not predisposed to trying to understand him. ( I like his mother, though.) One day, he was walking up to bat, and his father said "Remember, no hit, no dinner." The boy froze. The father laughed.

Poor kid. The father may have been joking -- who knows? -- but the boy thought he was completely serious. He had a panicked, desperate look on his face as he approached the plate. Fortunately, or perhaps not so fortunately, depending upon how it might have played out otherwise, the boy got a hit. They were not on the same team with us the next year, having requested different coaches, because they felt that the ones we had had (and who were continuing the team) just weren't aggressive enough. At least, that's what they told me. I was happy to have them elsewhere. The coaches they didn't want? They were a lovely couple who felt the emphasis should be on sportsmanship and fun and who were the best embodiment of what Little League professes itself to be about (as opposed to what it actually seems to be about) I've seen in nine years in the sport. And as for that boy -- I've gotten angry about how he's treated my son sometimes, but I can't find it in my heart to really dislike the kid.

Fortunately, I am down to only one Little Leaguer now. There was a time when I had three of them -- on three different teams, at three levels -- which meant three different game schedules to keep track of. More often than not, there were two games that overlapped -- or a game and a practice -- and sometimes three. Nothing like trying to be three places at once.

My kids aren't going to be their generation's Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire. That's not where their talents lie. I am not going to try and make them miserable thinking they have to be great at this -- I'm just happy if they get some exercise and fresh air. And having Little Leaguers has meant that I have actually used (i.e., for content, not simply as a pop-culture reference) Tom Hanks's exasperated exclamation from A League of Their Own: "Are you crying? There's no crying in baseball!"

Maybe baseball season isn't so bad after all. It means I get out in the sunshine -- what there is of it -- even if it is cold. Later on, in the late spring, games will very pleasant. And my son has reached the level where most of his games will be played at the park down the street. Which means I can walk to the game, and I'll get a little exercise. Win-win. Well, not exactly -- I've never had a kid on a winning team, and I doubt it will happen this year, either. But that's okay, too.

And you never know....

The most hapless team any child of mine was on was the last one that my middle child was part of. These kids were not merely bad, they were creatively bad. I didn't care, nor as far as I could tell did most of the other parents, at least past the mid-point of the season when it was apparent that they were not going be anything other than awful. We would sit in the stands and cheer anyway, because that's what you do. The coach, who was frustrated at the lack of skills of the players, still tried to rally her troops every game and keep their morale up. Which was hard towards the end: games that had been 15 run blowouts became absolutely gruesome after the "five run per inning" rule was lifted three weeks before the end of the "regular" season.

Then came time for the playoffs. It's a bit silly, really: all the teams go to the playoffs. We expected an early exit -- it's a double elimination tournament, so a couple of games and we'd be gone.

Well, no. The first game, we narrowly lost to the team that would go on to win the division championship. The second playoff game, we WON. All of a sudden, kids were hitting the cut-off man; sliding under tags; bunting. Not to mention hitting everything in sight. I still remember one pleased but shocked parent saying "What did the aliens do with our kids?" We won a second game, then a third game, and advanced to the quarterfinals.

Fairytales have to come to an end, and this one did. Throughout the streak, no one had said anything to the kids about what they had accomplished, other than "Good job!" They were just told to go out and have a good time and do their best. Other teams, burdened with expectations, couldn't handle a group of boys whose most pressing concern was what the snack was after the game. Unfortunately, before our last game, our coach told our boys in detail how remarkable their streak was and how they only had to win two more games to get to the championship game.

They came unglued. They reverted to the form they had had all season, with painful results. I don't remember the final score, other than "some godawful number to zero." I am sure I was not the only one unhappy with the coach. While I don't know that they would have won without her speech, I think they would have played better. They forgot about the "having fun" part.

You know, as much as I kvetch about Little League, I bet I'm going to miss it in three years when my youngest gets too old to play anymore.....

Naaah. It's still baseball season.

I hate baseball season.