Foul Strike

I was watching my son’s little league game one night, on the bleachers behind home plate, when I saw an old friend, Roger, and went over and sat with him. I knew him from some social experience somewhere in town, and his kid, in this game, was on the other team. He didn’t seem to mind that I supported my son once in a while by saying, “Go Dragons!” and he also would occasionally call out to his own son, who was on the Pirates. The Dragons were all decked out in green, with green caps; the Pirates were in black and yellow, so it was a pretty sight, with all those 9-year-olds running around playing baseball.

I was happy to find out that he agreed with me about one thing, that we should let the kids enjoy the game of baseball as much as possible, without real interference.

The world of parents is divided into those who agree with that statement, and the rest, and most of the fathers tend to be in the second category; they take baseball way too seriously. They tell their kids what to do; they yell at them. They yell at the umps. They shout about perceived unfairness.

Do they really think their kid is going all the way to the pros? Or that one bad call can ruin their kid’s life? It could be hardwired into them to care intensely about fairness in an umpire’s calls, but in some cases the umpires are kids, fifteen or sixteen, or they tend to make mistakes, sometimes several in a row. It doesn’t really help the kids to see their parents accuse the ump of being blind or being an idiot. Just let them play the game.

In this particular game the ump was an older guy with a big white mustache that you could see every time he took of his mask. He called strikes with a kind of song, which is what happens when you do it for many years, and he was unruffled by criticism, or he didn’t show it. There was this one Dragon parent, Roy, sitting down front, giving him a hard time, saying things like “You call that a strike?” or whatever, and the ump would barely look at him. Roy kept it up, too. He’d also criticize his own kid, Jason, who was a friend of my kid’s, and who was the pitcher for the Dragons for much of the game. Nothing Jason did was good enough for Roy. Roy took it personally that the Dragons were losing, though they were only losing by a couple of runs.

I don’t ride the ump, and I’ve come to leave my kid alone, except to say “Go Dragons!” every once in a while. Of course my own situation is colored by the fact that the more I’m involved with the game, or with how my kid is doing, the worse he seems to do, until it seems like opening my mouth is just about the worst thing that can happen to him, or to the team. It’s almost like, to get me to shut up, they tend to play worse the more I yell. Do the other parents experience this? I’m not sure. But I remember clearly, from both soccer and baseball, that even screaming generic, pro-Dragons messages didn’t ever translate into actual better play on the field; this was how I’d come to back off a little to begin with.

I told Roger about one season my kid was on a team that was coached by two highly competitive people, a lawyer and his assistant, and they were constantly harping at the poor umpires until you could see the umpires lose their patience. That whole season was like that, except for one night, when it rained right before the game and lots of parents of one team failed to show up; because it was an automatic win for the other team, they redistributed kids and just played a game that no longer counted. This game was the best of the season, because parents and coaches alike backed off and let the players work out what was fair, and what was foul. That was the night I realized that what I wanted was for the kids to play ball and have fun, and I could only have that by leaving them alone. It was hard to change my ways; I was one of the worst of the yellers. But I was trying.

Roger agreed with most of this, though he pointed out that, in our town at least, football was even worse. It was my claim that soccer was generally better than baseball in this regard, because the parents didn’t know the rules, or couldn’t see clearly enough to truly interfere with the refs. But he told a story about how a local coach was so hard on the ref, that she finally had to call the police and have him escorted off the field. I remembered hearing about an incident like that, I told him, and tried to recall what I did hear; maybe it was from our babysitter, Rachel, who spent whole summers being a ref at the park, and then coming over to our house to babysit our boys. Rachel had mentioned an incident, maybe two months ago, when she had to call the police and have a coach escorted off the field. It had upset her. She was fifteen, and here was this grown man, the coach, mercilessly badgering her and not backing down even when she told him very directly that she’d kick him out if he didn’t. She’d come over to our house shaking and upset, and we had to calm her down with tea and cookies.

That wasn’t the end of the story, according to Roger. The coach had stayed in the parking lot, because he was so mad and because he was unable to let go of the idea that the ref had, according to him, made some unfair call. Also, he was coach of the team, so he was finding it difficult, perhaps, to just walk away, even after he was escorted off the grounds by the police. But he’d made such a disturbance, there in the parking lot, that eventually the police called for backup to help him get on his way. And this time, a policeman arrived that had known him in high school, and didn’t like him, so they were a bit rough in arresting him and putting him into the car. His belligerence was just disrespectful enough, that that was all the excuse they needed, so they gave him a hard push into the police cruiser. I don’t want to make the police sound unnecessarily rough here, but it’s a small town, so the fact that this one guy knew the coach already was the issue that made people talk about it. Was he unnecessarily rough with him because of something that had happened in high school? The coach ended up breaking his nose in the incident, but worse, was asked not to coach the following year.

We were sitting there, directly behind the ump, and we could see that the ump in this league had a kind of wide strike zone; anything anywhere near the plate was a strike. They had a problem with kids just waiting for four balls, and taking the walk, and this happened often enough that the umps became generous in order to call more strikes. I never question the umps, though, and I wouldn’t even be slick enough to warn our kids about what was going on; I just try not to interfere in any way.  The question, of course, was whether this ump was calling more strikes for the Dragons than for the Pirates, which was Roy’s point, but I didn’t believe so; I know you can barely get through these games before some parent like Roy would say that the treatment was unequal. I sat up there in the bleachers getting steadily more aggravated by Roy’s badgering. I didn’t believe Roy was listening in to Roger’s story; he seemed to be intently watching every strike. Now, in a baseball story, you might expect the game to be close, or to rely on some disputed call, or to hinge on some outrageous umpire’s twisted view of reality. But that’s not going to happen here; it was a beautiful spring night; the ump was doing a good job, the best I could figure, and Roy was badgering him anyway. It didn’t help or hurt the Dragons. The Dragons were a couple of runs behind and staying that way.

I continued talking to Roger about the soccer incident, because I was trying to recall Rachel’s side of the story. I remembered her saying that there was a call that could be called controversial; it went against the son of the coach in question, a young kid who had a Mustang and made a lot of noise in the high school parking lot. She tried to be impartial, she said, but she called what she saw, and she felt like he was guilty. When the kid’s father started badgering her, she thought of giving in and changing the call, but instead the father and the son together made her even madder, and she refused to change the call, instead telling them to behave themselves or else. And from there it went downhill. When she’d told the story she’d had her doubts about her own calls and whether they were purely objective. But at that point she hadn’t even heard about the broken nose; it wasn’t part of her story. You’d think, in a town this small, that story would have got around like lightning, as it did with us adults. But she’s fifteen, and they live in an entirely different world. She cares about justice and fairness, and all that, but nobody tells her what just happened in the parking lot, if you know what I mean, or fills her in on what adults do to each other. It was possible she never even knew what happened to that coach, but I hope she didn’t feel guilty about it. As a ref, you call what you call. You don’t want people’s badgering to change your mind.

Now in the baseball game we were watching, as I was saying, there was no bottom-of-the-ninth moment, no tie game, no nail-biting tension.  This was fine with me, since I’m always afraid my kid will strike out, or let down the team, or do something he shouldn’t. Not to worry. The Dragons were still down by three, late in the game, and Roy was harping at the umpire steadily as he’d been, all game. Then, suddenly, though, a Pirates kid hit a foul ball, behind him, and it headed straight for Roy, who was standing behind the backstop. The ball smashed against the fence as Roy backed off, shocked; his fingers, which had been clutching the fence, almost got crushed by the ball. The ball fell to the ground on the other side of the fence as Roy backed off a little, and the ump called out, “Foul strike!” with his song. At that moment I noticed that the ump, mask off, white mustache and all, was actually smiling at Roy with a smile that said, basically, serves you right, I hope you learn your lesson for getting too close. And Roy did back off a little after that.

Roy came over and talked to us for a few minutes, as the game was ending; he’d apparently heard a little of the story of the coach, and knew more about some bad turn of events that happened to the coach in the short time he was being detained. But Roy never related the two events; he may have heard us talking about how parents and coaches should just back off, but it hadn’t occurred to him to do that himself. People like Roy and that coach take every play seriously, and have very strong feelings of injustice. Who knows what’ll happen with his poor kid.

2-2015