The boys of summer are back.
Ok, maybe it is not quite summer, with up and down temps, but you get my drift. Little league baseball is almost mid-season and oh what a season it is.
My youngest plays on a 10 and under team and they have had some pretty exciting games. It has been a fun time for us to be back on the diamond after having no season last year. It seems like the kiddos are happy to be back too as I've noticed a little more spring in their steps.
My husband and I weren’t sure our son was going to play this year either. It seems absurd that this kid with so much love for all sports would consider sitting out but that is where we were. The season before the pandemic was a rough one. There were a couple of incidents of being hit by the ball, once in the head and another in the foot, that left a lasting impression on this little baller.
Things got so bad that we actually had to bribe our kid to go to his last game and even then, he ended up watching the final few innings in the stands with us. The fear was real.
Apparently, you can’t just tell a kid that has been hit in the head to get back out there. (He was up to bat and did have a helmet on when the pitch took aim for his noggin.) It was a good thing this happened as the season was winding down because it would have made for a very long couple of months. The final two games were painful and a lesson in patience and empathy for us parents.
Our son wanted us to buy a face guard and a shin guard to help him feel less vulnerable on the field. I wanted to say, “Why don’t we just invest in a bubble? Does that sound good?”
Patience is a virtue and to be honest now that we are going through this parenting thing for the third time, I am running a little bit low. I don’t want to say I’m giving up but my tolerance is not where it once was, like when I was young and less gray.
You walk a fine line between babying a kid and getting them to toughen up. At the time, my son was eight-years-old. The kids had just graduated from coach pitch to kid pitch. As any baseball parent knows, this is the hardest transition for kid players. You go from having nice concentrated throws over the plate by an adult to wild errant pitches by kids. It is hard to find a groove for these little ones and sometimes there is the ball to the head.
It was scary for me to watch especially when there is an older, taller kid who has a pretty good arm already. One day I showed up to a game and asked my husband, “What is this, the World Series?” I was aghast. The pitches, it seemed to me, were at least 90 mph and my little guy was just standing at the plate, inches away from another fast ball to the brain.
With that being said, we really didn’t think our kid would play baseball again. This was very upsetting since baseball is the one sport, I know the most about and one that has a long family history. And to make matters worse, he was not only hit with a ball while batting, but he was also hit while fielding. There was no safe place for him to be.
Luckily, the pandemic year off actually worked in our favor because cancelled seasons and months off made the memories of being hit fade just a little. For months, there were no outside activities for our son to participate in and he really missed having these opportunities. When it came time to sign up this year for baseball, he did not put up a fight when we brought it up.
Personally, I think the chance to be with his friends again, in a setting that wasn’t a virtual classroom, outweighed any chance of injury. Also, a year is a lot of time to grow and mature. The kids are a little bigger and even our son has grown a few inches which makes him less of a target for a crazy pitch.
Fast forward to our son’s fourth game of the season this past Saturday, his team was losing 6-2 and it was the final inning. It didn't look good for the team but starting off with our son, hits helped load up the bases. I can still hear the crack of the bat by a player I’ll call “Spanky” that sent multiple runs around the bases to home plate.
Our kids ended up winning the game by one run and the celebrations and chants of “Spanky saved our lives!” will live on in my memory. Watching the team have fun and play their hearts out after a year off is something I don’t take for granted. Seeing them progress in their skills is fulfilling and the wins here and there, make it just a bit sweeter.
