The score on that humid Friday night ended at 27-3, and the electric scoreboard in the outfield highlighted the rude reality that our team had lost, and lost badly.
The next afternoon, to the relief of the parents, a deluge cut tournament action short, raining out the rest of the weekend.
The venerable Casey Stengel once said it best: “Now there’s three things you can do in a baseball game: You can win or you can lose or it can rain.”
Thank goodness for rain.
This season, we lost many of our kid-pitch games, with several exciting victories sprinkled in to nurture our children’s baseball addiction. Those are the games you live for — the infielders scoop the ball cleanly, the outfielders catch the pop ups, the pitchers toss the ball with precision and the bats come out.
Their delighted grins might have been my favorite part, though.
Our third-grade boys had worked since early March to learn the game and improve their skills. They ran drills and conditioned.
The coach was organized, knowledgeable and patient. He and his assistants cared about the things we care about: teaching the kids to play hard, learn the fundamentals of baseball and have fun.
Most importantly to us, he didn’t want to commit his family to a heavy schedule, which for some teams involves weekly league play plus weekend tournaments located near and far.
That’s the trend today — all baseball all the time, which is an investment some families choose to make so their kids can chase the dream.
We want our kid to chase his dreams, too, but we also want him to understand that family priorities involve the whole family. So we agreed to play recreational ball, with two local competitive tournaments for added experience.
Call me a poor loser, but the “added experience” proved difficult to stomach.
The 27-3 tournament game was not our first loss, but it was the first time our son reacted with total dejection. Afterward, he slouched into the back seat, his hair drenched in sweat and his uniform coated in dirt. With quiet certainty he said, “I played just awful, Mom. We are really bad.”
That game, our boys did struggle to field the ball and hit. This was tournament play with 40 pages of rules to decipher, including no limitation on how many runs could be scored in an inning and no restriction on running the bases.
