The Best Years

They go fast. One day you are putting the ball on the T and then the next you are driving home from a high school game that is your sons last. In between are a million games played in dusty hot fields with your son while you as the assistant coach get to go along for the ride. And you don't know that much about baseball but nine years later you know it all. Because you have been there all along as your son learns the game and then became good and then became talented and then finds out that talent has limits too.

And you have gone to McDonald's a hundred times. You have gone to Dairy Queen a hundred times but that is all over now. No longer do you savor the games won and lament the games lost. No longer do you discuss the game with the other dad coaches and replay the dramas as you coach first or second or you call the game from the dugout. No longer are you discussing the game driving home in the twilight or better still finding yourself still there in the parking lot with your son talking it over as the sun rims the trees.

Because he has grown up and college is not far away and baseball games are no longer. You no longer have bats and balls and hats and gloves in the back of your car. You no longer have field dust on your shoes and all over your seats. That now belongs to memories. And occasionally you find yourself driving past the old ball fields. They are empty now and it is getting toward winter. And you slow just a little and feel the old tug.

And you know then...those were the best years.

The Pitcher


 

School and the Agrarian Cycle

Used to be kids went home to the farm to help with the harvest. Planting and then harvesting and then back to school. And yet we no longer have any type of Agrarian Cycle at all. We just have the grocery store and the belief that summer is for kids to be off school and fall is for the return of school. My whole life up until I was twenty four was governed by this cycle. June was for going home and leaving the cinder blocked incarceration of dusty erasers and lead pencils and the smell of mimeographed sheets.

Summer was to go on forever. In June there is no belief that fall will come. School will not resume. There will only be summer forever. And the empty school lot proved the point. The teachers had all disappeared too and the school stood empty with the flag pole rope flapping for no one. Only the janitor was still there and I would ride by on my bike and see him there smoking a cigarette out by the back door. The last remaining soldier.

But the fall did come back and suddenly we were back in the classroom .And so it still is. Next week all the kids will return and the adults will continue their same day in day out routine. And the kids will begin their cycle again until one day they too will leave for good. And they may stare out the window and sigh as the last days of summer expire on the hot pavement and think they will be lucky one day to be free of the old Agrarian cycle.

Never knowing how lucky they are to be on that old clock.

The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have  

The Reality of High School Sports

You go along like I did as an assistant coach starting in T Ball. And then you move along through the In House Leagues. The playing gets more intense and more fun. The kids are starting to know what they are doing and talent springs eternal and you start to think your kid really has something. There are the standouts. The kids who in sixth grade are pounding the ball into the outfield. And then there are the kids who can pitch and have a fastball that freezes kids at the plate. All of this is with Dad Coaches and the parents are way into the games now and people scream because they are glimmering something bigger. High School ball.

And then it happens. Everyone troops off in the ninth grade and the numbers move in along with a reality that just seems so unfair. The majority of kids who have been playing baseball for nine years will not play anymore. They will either not make the team or they will make the team and sit on the bench. The chosen few continue on in high school but for most kids it is the end of playing sports. How did it come to this?

Too many people. The large high schools of the Chicago land area are a good example. The level of competition is such that only the very best of the best get to play. The influence of personal coaching and high priced sports clinics and programs. The parents who shell out the heavy duty cash just have a better chance of seeing their kids play in high school. Maybe it starts with the mentality of travel ball where kids wear uniforms like major leagues and parents again shell out thousands for the best teams.

So the reality of high school sports is that for most kids is marks the end of playing not the beginning. Gone are the days when everyone could get a chance to play. That belongs to a time when there just weren't as many people.

The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have