by Donna Andrews
I've spent a lot of my spring watching baseball. One of my nephews played on a Little League AAA team this spring. His more sports-crazy brother played on a Little League majors team AND a travel team. This meant that most weeks we grownups had to get one or the other of them to a total of three practices and six games.
It's a good thing I like baseball.
In fact, I like baseball so much that before too long I want to use it in one of my books again. Meg Langslow's kids will be old enough for Little League soon. I might just have to make her husband, Michael, the assistant coach.
I'll have to wait until they're ready for kid-pitch, though, because I already had some fun with T-ball in The Real Macaw. I wanted to have Meg overhear some town gossip and I figured what better place than the bleachers, while she was watching her honorary nephew, Timmy:
Out on the field, the coach and various parents who'd volunteered or been drafted as assistant coaches were herding the Caerphilly Red Sox toward their bench. Someone had applied generous daubs of eye black to all the players' cheeks, making them look more than ever like a small but savage tribe about to go on the warpath.
I peered down at my own small savages. Josh was fast asleep. Jamie was awake, and happily watching a small, faceted toy, rather like a miniature disco ball, that hung from the roof of the carriage, twirling and glittering in the slightest breeze.. . . Odds were both boys would want something soon, and probably simultaneously, but for now, I could bask in the pleasantly warm April air and relax.
Or maybe not. Over on the Red Sox bench, Timmy and one of his teammates had begun hitting each other on the helmet with their bats and giggling uproariously. Where was the bench coach? And for that matter, where was the other kid's mother?
I should do something. But the bench was a good ten feet away from the bleachers. I looked around and spotted someone I knew from the pediatrician's office.
"Could you keep an eye on my twins for a second?" I asked her.
She nodded, and I strode over to the bench and grabbed the end of the other kid's bat just as he was about to pound Timmy's helmet.
"Stop that," I said.
"We're wearing helmets," the other kid said. "It's not going to hurt anything."
He pulled at the bat, trying free it.
"Bats against the fence unless you're actually batting." I was quoting one of the few T-ball rules I'd learned so far. I pulled a little harder and gained possession of the bat. "You, too," I said, holding out my hand to Timmy, who prompted surrendered his blunt instrument. He wasn't a bad child, just a little easily misled.
I hooked the bats into the chain link fence behind home plate and returned to my seat by the baby carriage.
"Thanks," I said to my temporary babysitter.
"You're welcome," she said. "You saved me the trouble of walking over there. That was one of my monsters trying to bludgeon your kid."
I wasn't quite sure how to respond, but fortunately I didn't have to. She was soon immersed in a conversation with two other mothers about logistics for a birthday party. A birthday party to which Timmy hadn't been invited. Maybe I should start working to improve his social life.
The Caerphilly Red Sox took the field. Timmy was playing the pitcher's position. Of course since in T-ball the kids whacked a stationary ball set atop an overgrown golf tee, "pitcher" was a purely honorary title for an additional infielder. I smiled and waved, in case he was watching. The Clay County Yankees coach hauled out the tee, placed a ball on it, and began coaxing the first batter to take his place at the plate.
Veteran T-ball parents will doubtless recognize this scene. Or later, after Meg has had a conversation with one of the neighbors:
"Oh, no," someone behind me said. "They're swarming again."
Swarming? I looked around, expecting to see a cloud of some kind of insects, and ready to throw myself between it and the twins. But no one else seemed alarmed, and I realized that the speaker was pointing to the ball field. One of the Clay County Yankees had gotten a decent hit, and several of our Red Sox were competing to see who could reach it first.
In fact, the first, second and third basemen, the left and right shortstops, and the left and center fielders were all running madly in the direction of the ball. I understood what the other mother meant by swarming. The only players not involved were the right fielder, who appeared to be taking a nap; the catcher, who was so weighed down by his protective gear that he could barely walk; and Timmy, who was watching a bug crawl up his arm.
"Play your positions! Play your positions!" the coach was shouting.
"Jason! Get back on first base!" one mother shouted. "Jason, I mean it! Now!"
Other mothers and a few fathers shrieked equally futile instructions. The kids were ignoring them, and had ended up in a small, writhing heap in the general vicinity of where we'd last seen the ball.
The Yankee runner had reached first base and was watching the action, perhaps wondering if she should try for another base. In a real ball game, she'd have been crazy not to. By this time, three of the Red Sox were wrestling for the ball, while the coach and one of the fathers tried to separate them, and the rest of the team stood watching and cheering them on. The Yankee batter could probably have made two or three circuits of the bases by the time one Red Sox player emerged holding the ball.
But in T-ball, there was either a rule or a longstanding tradition that you only got one base when you hit the ball, so after looking longingly at second, the runner sat down on first base to untie and retie her shoelaces half a dozen times.
"Positions!" the Red Sox coach shouted, giving various players gentle shoves in the right directions. "Positions!"
But it took a while for the game to resume, because one of the players who had not won the fight for the ball ran off the field to be comforted by his mother, and another sat down in the outfield and refused to get up. And when the Red Sox coach finally got all his players upright and back where they belonged, someone finally noticed that there were two Yankee runners on second base. It took several minutes to sort out which one belonged there and which one should have continued on to third when the batter got her hit.
Yes, that's T-ball as I remember it. I also recall the first time I saw the boys practicing in their back yard. Sometimes it took them two, three, four, even five whacks to hit the ball—the slightly oversized ball sitting motionless on the giant golf tee. How was my brother going to deal with the realization that neither of his sons was going to be a good baseball player?
Actually, my brother wasn't worried, because he'd seen the other kids on their teams. Anyone who could hit the teed ball in under six whacks was clearly a future Babe Ruth. Some of the kids could go several dozen swings before finally connecting with the ball.
It's fun to think of their progress over the years. I remember the days when the sight of one of the opposing team's runners trying to steal a base would cause all of us on the bleachers to cringe while the coaches yelled “Eat it! Eat it!” Which appears to be Little Leaguese for “Please, just get the ball back to the pitcher, because anything else you try to do will only make things so much worse.”
I can remember when the approach of a pop fly would cause most of the fielders to hunch their shoulders, close their eyes, and stick out their gloves in some random direction until the sound of the ball hitting the grass reassured them that they weren't going to get beaned this time.
I still remember the first time one of my nephews actually caught a pop fly. He was so excited that it took him quite a while to figure out what to do with the ball, but that was okay—all the base runners were equally dumbfounded and only began running to tag up when the nephew started his throw. In another small miracle, he got one of them out.
Now they all pepper the ball around like tiny pros, and attempted larceny at third is only sometimes successful.
Yes, I really ought to start thinking of how to work a baseball game into one of my books. I don't do child jeop, and killing off an umpire would be too cliched. But I have a parent in mind—I call him Actuary Dad. He had calculated, to the penny, exactly how much he'd spent on his son's baseball gear, and was often heard to utter things like. “What's wrong with his helmet? Do I really have to buy a new one? I've already spend so much on his gear that it's costing me $32.87 a game.” Or “Damn, that canceled game means I'll paying 41.30 for each game he actually plays.” Sounds like the perfect murder victim to me. Can anyone beat that?
And it would be good to have a baseball related project, now that I'm about to go cold turkey on baselines and diamonds. The travel team playoffs were this past weekend. The last of the regular Little League playoffs would have been, too, if we hadn't had so many weather-induced postponements. The nephew's Majors team will be playing for the pennant tomorrow, and if they win, in the finals on Thursday. And after that--
Wait a sec. One of the nephews made All-Stars! My baseball jones can continue unchecked for a while.
But I still think a baseball book would be a good idea. First thing is to think of a title. Any suggestions?
Oh, and speaking of titles, I'm running a contest over on my Facebook page. Posting a few titles readers have suggested, asking people to pick their favorites and tell me how I could use them. Check it out here.
