The end of one baseball season reminded me of another.
On Saturday my 12-year-old son’s summer season ended with a loss.
That’s how seasons end.
One team wins the final game. Another team loses.
Everybody goes home.
There was some serendipity to this one. We were at the Bridgeton Municipal Athletic Complex — BMAC to veterans of the baseball tournament scene — which was the same place his first summer tournament season ended.
When I was a kid, we didn’t play tournaments, we played Little League.
Dad would show up at the tryouts with a list that included a few of my friends. Most of the coaches had stopwatches to time the fastest players. Dad didn’t bother. Of course, that doesn’t stop him from telling the same joke at every family gathering.
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“Son, do you remember baseball tryouts?†he will ask. “All the coaches brought stopwatches. But when you ran, they used a sundial.â€
Like his old man, my son is not blessed with the fleetest of feet.
We call him “Wheels.â€
It’s one of those ironic nicknames. When he stretches a triple to a double, the dugout will cheer in unison: “Way to go, Wheels.â€
I’ll turn to the parent next to me and say: “Get that kid a cheeseburger.â€
I have my dad’s sense of humor.
But back to Bridgeton.
Generally after a loss, there is this parental moment where we gauge the mood of the boy: Will the drive home be a silent one? How long until we can talk? Not so this weekend. Nobody likes to lose, but five minutes after the game, a group of the boys were planning a movie outing later that day. Time to go watch some dinosaurs rip apart a few Jeeps as man once again fails to control Mother Nature.
Then, of course, there would be some Fortnite to be played, that current bane of every parent I know.
The post-loss mood — my son and his Redbirds teammates knew immediately that there was much to celebrate, including, frankly, the end of a long season — took me back to another day at BMAC, four or five years ago.
The Athletics had just lost their final tournament game of the season. It wasn’t very close.
Behind that particular field is a playground.
Within five minutes the boys were climbing and sliding, laughing and jostling.
Baseball season was over. It was time to let loose.
A couple of months ago ºüÀêÊÓƵ Cardinals president of baseball operations was the keynote speaker at the first annual Joe Strauss Memorial Golf Tournament, a fundraiser honoring my former colleague, the Post-Dispatch sports columnist who succumbed to cancer in 2015.
I asked Mozeliak what he thought about the youth baseball culture in ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
We are doing it wrong, he said.
It turns out, Mozeliak has a son about my son’s age, and we are both living the same baseball world, one in which parents pay too much money for too many games all in the pursuit of that elusive dream of a baseball scholarship that is unlikely to come.
We argue over classifications like AA, AAA and Major; we travel the tryout circuit and seek out the elitist of the most elite.
For more than a decade now I’ve been a sometimes hypocritical follower of the advice in a book that analyzes everything America does wrong when it comes to youth sports. It’s a long list. Professionalizing our children before they are even teenagers and creating expensive sports circuits in baseball, volleyball, soccer — you name it — are at the top of the list.
Mozeliak and I share a trait.
We both know this process is flawed, but it’s what we have.
So we play along.
Next month my son turns 13. He’ll celebrate by having friends from two different baseball teams he plays on over to the house. They’ll play whiffle ball, eat some pizza, and, well, play Fortnite.
I’ll imagine earlier days of playgrounds and lazy summers watching them enjoy the freedom to play ball in the backyard, making up their rules as they go, because adults tend to mess things up.
Then I’ll snap out of it.
Fall ball is around the corner.
I better get online and reserve some cage time.