Baseball (Mis)Adventures
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’ve written before about Boy 8’s encounter with baseball. It’s been a looong 8-week season so far. It’s been fun to watch the team progress, though. The boys are actually gaining some noticeable skills. They catch better. They hit better.
And then there’s my boy 8. He just doesn’t seem to get it. Last night he played catcher. Decked out in gear that’s too big for him, he looks like a stack of plastic and padding that somehow stays upright. (The boy pictured here is not my boy 8, but the effect is the same.)
The pitching is by machine, so it’s a strike every time. But the catcher sits well back of the plate so there’s no danger of getting clubbed by a wild swing. Of which there are many.
Boy 8 sits waaaay back. He kneels on the ground and lays his mitt flat in front of him (his hand still in it.) I’m sure he thinks his role is to hold the mitt as still as possible, and he does that very well. Whenever I played catcher, my coach told me to give the pitcher a good target. That meant to hold the mitt in the strike zone. Boy 8 must think it means to hold really still so the machine has a better chance of hitting him.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re supposed to get the balls and throw them back to the pitcher.”
“Nah,” said a muffled sound emanating from the mask. “They’ll get them.” ‘They’ being the coaches, and in fact they did. When runners are dashing from third base to home while infielders chase the ball they just missed catching, boy 8, the guardian of home plate, is scraping together a pile of dirt by the backstop. He stands sticks in the dirt as robot soldiers.
Have you ever watched pee-wee baseball? In which a boy barely big enough for his hat knocks a ball from the tee to the pitcher’s mound where it is pounced upon by 13 boys who run up to it from all corners of the infield? Boy 8 is one year above that crowd. While having fun is still the advertised priority, the grown up coaches are also trying to teach the boys some actual game skills. I think back to boy 8’s first game when he told me, “I don’t think I’m cut out for baseball.” I wonder if he’s right.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Did he actually ask to play, or are you trying to “get him involved?” hoping he’ll learn he likes it?
June 12th, 2008 at 9:57 am
He wanted to play, and has a great time every game. The team is almost undefeated, and he celebrates every victory. It’s just that he seems to think playing the game is taking your turn at bat, and that’s it.