“They’re like puppies…”

Yesterday Jessica and I went to watch my nephew’s baseball team play a game in Asheville.  I hadn’t watched Little League Baseball in person in a few years, and I forgot what a powerful experience that simple little game was in my childhood.

I’m not sure where the love of baseball started in my family, but I know it runs deep. My grandfather coached all of his children through Little League baseball and for around 10 years afterwards, still just wanting to be involved. My father was a pitching prodigy at Asheville High School before the teenage malaise mixed with a thirst for hard drugs and petty crime robbed him of his promise and talent.  My Uncles were also lifelong players of the game, and this love for the sport seemed to take me over for a while as a child.

I guess it was like anything else that happens when you are a kid: you learn something and quickly find that you have an ability, and then that lust you had for it fizzles away when your skill level evens out with the other children around.  I had briefly loved the game, but lacked the athletic prowess to really dedicate myself to playing into my later years.  My sister did play however; first baseball and then softball filling the need that seemed to permeate through every member of my family.

Even my grandmother, who seemed to never like much of anything loved baseball in her own quiet way.  She frequently told stories of my grandfather’s team defeating a team coached by their best friend and the joy of watching their children cry after the loss.  Even after her children were grown and my sister and I had entered our teens and decided that baseball was a thing of the past, a typical summer evening would consist of buying fast food dinner or dessert and then heading to the baseball field to watch kids whom we didn’t even know play baseball.

Now I’m older and respect myself too much to join a beer league team, but my sister’s children are all playing baseball.  There’s something so nice about that.  So when my schedule finally lined up with one of my nephew’s games, I jumped at the chance to see him play.

His team wasn’t very good. I marveled at how they constantly couldn’t grab simple ground balls.  I laughed and compared them to puppies, uncoordinated and full of youthful energy.  They couldn’t hit, but they made up for that by not being able to catch.  But the real revelation was watching Mateo play.  He’s a work in progress, but (and I hope this isn’t my Uncle-y pride speaking) he looks like a ball player.  He’s a painfully thin little guy with long legs and a big head.  He looks like a matchstick with his orange hat on and is constantly pounding his little fist into his giant brown leather glove, adjusting his cap and spitting.  It’s what baseball players do.

He played shortstop yesterday, made one great stop of a ground ball and completely blew two other plays.  But he looked like a ball player.  That’s got to count for something.

A wave of emotion came over me at the baseball field.  There’s something to about watching him play.  My grandmother, even in death, was somehow there with me silently watching the game, my niece was beside me, my sister being a doting mother, my grandfather screaming directions to all of the players,  excited that his great grandson was playing the game he’d devoted so much of his life to, my big black dog panting in the heat, my nephew Erik playing a pickup game with other children on the spare diamond, and my lady with me smiling and taking it all in while getting a hellish sunburn.

On that day, I could care less if we were the Norman Rockwell family, or if we all piled into Jess’ Suburu like clowns at the circus (or however that cliche goes). We were all one big family being tied together by baseball, a living breathing history of a family strung together by nine innings, twenty seven outs and third graders flailing around for ground balls, and it was beautiful.

Yesterday I stood up from my lawn chair seat behind home plate and put my face against the mesh fence while Mateo stood to bat. I cheered for him to get a hit and I turned and saw my family, red-faced from the heat.

“I’m having so much fun,” was all I managed to say, and we all were.