Registration continues this Saturday, April 7, for little league baseball in Haines. Sign your child up.
Little league builds character, and the worse player you are, the more character you build. When it comes to little league, it’s all good, and I don’t say that lightly. “It’s all good” is an expression I can’t stand.
In the annals of little league baseball, there have been some truly atrocious players, boys and girls who had no business at all stepping onto a field where bats are swung, a hard object is thrown, and players run at other players at high speeds.
I know. I was one of them. In fact, I’d put my lack of baseball ability up against even the greatest of the worst. I smelled up the field so badly as to become something of a legend in the sport in my hometown of Media, Pa. To this day, I cannot be embarrassed because I used up my lifetime supply of embarrassment on a baseball diamond at a tender age.
It came naturally. I could not hit the ball. I’m not sure I could really even see it. Or maybe I closed my eyes out of fear when it approached. Either way, the chances of my bat coming into contact with the ball were only slightly better than a UFO hovering over the field and beaming me up out of the batter’s box. Which is the kind of deliverance I prayed for, but never came.
The problem was Dr. Rood. He was my first little league coach, a saint of a man in a sport that attracts a disproportionate number of volunteer jerks. Dr. Rood insisted that each player on his team get a chance to field and to bat in every game – regardless of ability. This is how Dr. Rood earned the enmity of our entire team, including me.
As Dr. Rood was unfailingly fair but not stupid, he played me only in the final innings and only in right field where the ball was rarely hit and I could amuse myself chasing bugs and daydreaming. I would play deep in the field, so deep that no batter could ever knock a ball over my head and any grounder would come to a complete stop before reaching me. To my thinking, this was prudent defense. Dr. Rood spent a lot of his time waving me in, pleading for me to play in the same park as the rest of the team.
I earned my chops that first year at the plate. Such a zero as a hitter, I yearned for our team either to be hopelessly behind or dominantly ahead when I came up to bat. Either would make my strike-out inconsequential to the final outcome.
But fate had more pain in mind. Invariably, my at-bats came toward the end of close games when our team needed runs or a hit or even just a walk. For the life of me, I could not deliver. With runners on, my team would be rallying, the whole bench would become animated at the prospect of victory, then they would see me grabbing a bat and hope would drain from their faces like syrup leaking out the bottom of a snow cone.
“No!” they would say to themselves or to each other, “Not Morphet. Anyone but Morphet.”
“No,” I would be thinking. “Anyone but me. Let anyone else bat besides me.”
Dr. Rood would have none of it. He would rather go down giving a complete incompetent a chance at something impossible than to grant his team the small joy of a little league victory.
I hated him for it.
I came into contact with the ball three times that season. Twice I grounded out and the third time – during the final game of the season – a third baseman bobbled a dribbler off my bat. I was approaching first base for the first time in my life and, with no idea what to do next, I slid into the bag. The stands erupted in laughter. I had no idea what I’d done, but someone told me to stay put. I was on base.
Besides getting a hit, my greatest dream that year was that I would cross home plate and score for our team. Hits by two teammates later and I was within reach of my fantasy. I was on third base, longing for home plate.
But at the very same moment, a dark sky opened up and a deluge came pouring down. The game was called for rain.
Had my baseball career ended there, I’d have been a nobody, just another kid with no game, but it got so much worse. I played three or four years of little league. Why, I have no idea. I had a couple brothers who were all-stars. Maybe I thought it would rub off. That never happened.
In our town’s little league, the season started each spring with a draft or “try-outs.” At try-outs, you got in line with every other player in town and a coach would knock you fly balls and grounders so everyone could check out your fielding skills. Then you’d get a chance at the plate to show how well you could bat.
After try-outs, the coaches divvied up the best players. The very best were drafted in their own little league called “the major league,” with full uniforms and games in a real baseball stadium with a loudspeaker announcer and an electronic scoreboard and a home run fence. The rest of us got T-shirts and played on weedy diamonds behind the elementary school.
Try-outs were held at the “major league” field and on my last year of little league my younger brother who played in the majors was in the crowd of kids who showed up to watch from the bleachers as we each got a chance to demonstrate our fielding prowess. I was hit a towering high pop. As memory serves, I got a bead on the ball, got directly below it, and raised my open glove to catch it.
But the ball didn’t arrive as soon as I expected, so I lowered my mitt and took the ball directly on my forehead. It knocked me down.
As my little brother tells the story, half of the crowd was aghast, thinking I might be dead and the other half couldn’t stop laughing at the absurdity of the play. Then someone turned to him and said, “Hey, John, wasn’t that your brother?”
According to family lore, John became mute at the question, jumped off the bleachers and ran home to hide the shame I’d brought down on him.
But even that – one of the stupidest moments in little league play in Media – did not deter me. The following year I tried out for teen league ball. As a force of poor baseball, I was unrelenting, like a head cold that just would not go away.
But the organizers of teen league would not tolerate the likes of Dr. Rood, and by the time you were a teenager in Media, Pa. in the early 1970s, certain things were expected of you. Baseball players were expected to be able to play baseball.
So I became a player in name only. I sat on the bench. I still warmed up with other players before the games and I helped hunt for foul balls that were knocked into the woods adjoining our diamond, but I didn’t get to play.
I think my coach just hoped that I would get a clue and quit.
But I can be ridiculously optimistic and maybe I believed that baseball skill would descend on me one night like the angel Gabriel descended on Mary. Again, I cannot quite remember.
I was especially hyped at a game one night and very excited when I was called on to look for fouls knocked into the woods, as the game was in danger of being called for lack of baseballs. Some batter on my team kept slicing them off the right field line.
I had discovered a ball that I returned to a coach at first base and was heading back to my mission in the forest when I heard the crack of a bat and saw a ball above me. In my high state of excitement, I called off the approaching first baseman and made the catch.
The umpire, stunned and at a loss for what to rule, called my teammate out.
The place went crazy. “Hey, good catch,” ridiculed those of my teammates who did not say worse things, or hit me with their gloves or spit in my general direction.
I think at that point I walked home and never played baseball again.
But to this day I am crazy for the sport. Eventually, I learned to bat – left handed – and proved myself useful in some pick-up games. I listen to Mariner games on the radio whenever I can and check the standings in the newspapers. I’ve been promising myself a trip to Safeco Field for years.
There’s just something appealing about a sport that has no clock and moves slowly enough that an announcer can tell a joke or anecdote between plays.
Also, it builds character.
Registration is 9 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Haines Borough Public Library. All boys and girls ages 9-12 are welcome to sign up.