T-ball or not T-ball, that is the question

The other day I was heading home from work and I passed a park. I noticed there were several adults sitting on lawn chairs and bleachers. It was as American as a Norman Rockwell painting of a mother eating apple pie, a baseball diamond basking in the summer sun. A place for the national pastime to be played by, oh my goodness, who is playing? The coach looked like Godzilla attempting to stomp out Tokyo. He was not a giant, but the people wearing the matching jerseys and hats were tiny. These kids were so young they still had ink on the soles of their feet from getting foot printed at the hospital. These kids were so young if they won the game they’d pour Enfamil over each others’ heads in celebration. These kids were so young Barney is too sophisticated for them.

I do not understand the need to enlist children still eligible to have a lunch comprised of Gerber products in organized sports. They should at least be able to spell T-ball before they play it. I doubt even Albert Pujols showed much talent when he was small enough to take a nap inside a standard issue major league catcher’s mitt.

Kids that little are meant to bounce about in free form. Not exist in some fascist stand here, now run, now stand here, now run paradigm. It’s like taking potato chips which should be free to randomly mix and mingle in their oversized bags and forcing them to follow some Stalin-esque regime and fit together in the goose-stepping conformity of a Pringles can. Did you ever notice the original “crush proof container” for Pringles was red? I bet if you ate too many of them you would suddenly be stricken with a bad case of the Trotsky’s.

I waited until past the toddler stage before I succumbed to the parental pressures and signed my second daughter up for T-ball. She wasn’t terribly excited about it but was willing to join in, at first. Practices were fine because there were usually popsicles at the end. The actual games proved too ridiculous even for her.

The image I will take to my grave of Alice playing T-ball was put on display every time somebody hit the ball out of the infield while her team was on defense. The miniature Manny Ramirez (who not only hasn’t injected synthetic testosterone, but has barely experienced any of his own testosterone moving through his blood stream) puts a real charge into the ball and it rolls between the locked in place infielders who are much more interested in waving at Grandma, who is wearing a hat capable of blotting out the sun causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, than in the trajectory of the ball. It is only when the official coach and the twenty or thirty unofficial coaches start screaming that the entire squad kicks into high gear. Each and every kid spins and looks where all the spectators are pointing and start sprinting after the errant Spalding.

This is when it became obvious my daughter was not a highly competitive or motivated T-ball player. The players had evacuated the infield like it was a European soccer field after the tear gas and high pressure hoses had been turned on the crowd. All of them except Alice. She is standing at second base, where she was assigned to stand, gazing after her teammates with her hands on her hips and an exasperated expression on her face. After the first three players on the scene of the now at rest baseball wrestle each other for possession of the horsehide, the winner turns to throw it into the infield.

There’s Alice standing at second base. The base runner is just now rounding first base because the coach had to remind him to run and then had to remind him which direction to run and then had to remind him he could keep running after he made it to first base and then had to remind him where second base was and then had to remind him to pull up his shorts which had become entangled around his knees. Alice was in perfect position to receive the throw from the outfield and tag the runner out.

The third baseman turned centerfielder uncorks a throw of unimaginable force, for someone shorter than a barefoot Billy Barty. The ball is sent on “frozen rope” deep into the neighboring diamond’s left field and all the next generation Yankees are released again like the bovine residents of Pamplona.

Christopher Pyle simply bought a huge box of popsicles and didn’t make his kid do T-ball anymore. He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.