Hit or Miss, Remember to Get the Bat Off Your Shoulder

I remember the pitcher was a stocky left-hander named Jonathan. It was whispered in the opposing dugouts that he threw a curveball. Looking back across some 35 years, I now doubt this was true. Jonathan--I don’t recall his last name--would have been only 8 or 9, too young to be spinning curves.

The setting was a sweetheart of a diamond in Fresno’s Sunnyside district, on the eastern edge of town. The ballpark, pride of the Lone Star Little League, had night lights, an announcer’s booth and a plywood fence plastered with advertisements. The outfield and infield grass most likely was just stringy Bermuda, but to our young eyes it seemed lush, a perfect carpet.

It was early summer, late afternoon, a playoff game. I remember not running but watching the ball after I hit it--given the circumstances, a forgivable violation of baseball fundamentals. The hit was only a blooper, I realize now, but back then the ball seemed to soar magically, heroically even, into left field.

It was my first legitimate Little League hit, and that I can recall it so vividly is a curious thing. I can’t remember what I wrote in this space two weeks ago. I do remember that hit.

I unwrap this memory for a reason. This is the time of year when Little Leagues--and the other, less-heralded youth baseball leagues--begin their season playoffs and tournament competitions. It tends to be a time when scandals emerge, depressingly familiar stories of all-star teams recruiting ringers, of umpires being pummeled in parking lots, of loudmouthed parents berating their little ballplayers, turning baseball into a nightmare of tension and tears.

And they are not fictional, these stories. The broader impressions they create are not altogether inaccurate. From a distance, an organized youth baseball game can take on the appearance of a pathetic farce, a cacophony of parents barking out bad advice to nervous children at all the wrong times. That, though, is not the entire story.

What I also remember from my season of the first hit was the coach of our team, a big man with a flattop haircut who I knew only as Mr. Seeley. Mr. Seeley was not one of those coaches who constantly remind weaker hitters that “a walk is as good as a hit,” a not-so-subtle invitation to not swing the bat. No, Mr. Seeley encouraged me to hack away, and every time I struck out swinging--which was quite often that year--he would praise me.

“Way to get your cuts!” he would shout with gusto.

“Way to get the bat off your shoulder!”

Was it possible this coach somehow knew that, when all was said and done, what I would take away from Little League baseball at that age were memories, not of strikeouts or even walks, but of a hit--if I could get a hit? And, if so, why waste a single opportunity to make contact?

These days I find myself in the third-base coaching box, trying to coax 9-year-olds through one of the more difficult tasks in sport, a conundrum baseball old-timers classically described as “swinging a round bat at a round ball and hitting it square.”

Inevitably, in three years I’ve witnessed some boorish parental behavior--nothing worthy of headlines, but little moments, some ugly, some simply laughable. I could tell stories, but won’t. They are stories that have been told many times before, from Little League fields all over the land.

I’ve come to suspect that the extra energy swirling up from Little League grandstands has something to do with baseball’s place in American culture. My impression is that some parents--certainly not all--believe a child not competent on the baseball field somehow reflects directly, and poorly, on the job they’ve done. Not being able to kick a soccer ball or master basketball footwork is one thing. Not being able to properly throw a baseball is something else altogether.

This is crazy, of course, but in another sense not completely off the mark. There is connective tissue in baseball that runs across generations, and it is one of the most beautiful things about the sport. Evidence of it pops up on Little League diamonds all the time. It can be heard in bits of advice. A father instructs his son as his father instructed him: Get your glove in the dirt; throw hard, put your belly into it. It can be found in expressions, phrases of encouragement, even jokes.

Just the other day on the practice field I heard a player’s grandfather, a former professional player himself, telling someone to start moving around more: “You’re killing the grass!” he shouted. As he said this I smiled. This was a baseball echo, bouncing across three generations. I first heard about killing grass way back when in Fresno, from a coach who taught me more than a few things about the game. It got me thinking about that coach, Mr. Seeley, and it reminded me why it is I make it a point to applaud the kids who go down swinging.

Way to get your cuts, I tell them.

Way to go get the bat off your shoulder.

And as it would happen, the night after that practice, in a tight playoff game, the only player on our team without a hit so far this season finally came through in the fourth inning. It was only an infield dribbler, but a legitimate hit nonetheless. It will pick up speed and distance over the years.