Spring Brings Out the Killer Instinct

Ah, spring. Lying in the frontyard like unemployed leprechauns. Hands behind our heads. Loving the high sky and the vapor trails.

“Guess those Christmas lights oughta come down,” I say, noticing lights on some nearby eaves.

I’m a stickler on Christmas lights. I believe they ought to come down by June.

“Get the ladder,” I tell my son.

“Dad, that’s not our house,” the boy says.

“Thank God,” I say.

Ah, spring. Heading over to the softball field for the little girl’s game, dragging an equipment bag that weighs more than I do, a big green duffel bag dating to 1944.

“Takes me back to my war days, this duffel bag,” I say.

“Dad.”

“What?”

“You were never in the war,” the boy says.

“Thank God,” I say.

We spread the softball bats out in the dugout. Grab the catcher’s gear. Lay out some bases.

“OK, everybody, start warming up,” I tell the team.

“Dad.”

“What?”

“The team’s not here yet,” the boy says.

“Thank God,” I say.

*

So we lie back down in the grass and wait for the little girl’s teammates, admiring the high sky and the vapor trails. The ball field grass, soft as mother’s hair. I nod off for five minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty.

“Dad.”

“Huh?”

“The team’s here.”

Sure enough, there’s a team here. My team. The Purple Killer K’s.

When the season started, they wanted to call themselves the Killer Purple Eggplants. No kidding.

They were excited about the name, too, till a couple of parents objected that they didn’t want to spend their spring evenings yelling “Go Eggplants!” from the hard metal stands, as if they expected to do much yelling anyway. Mostly, they would just sit over there exchanging stock tips and sipping mysterious fluids from a thermos one of the mothers always brings.

“OK, instead we’ll be the Killer K’s,” I finally say, a nod to our law firm sponsor, Kern & Gonzalez. Medical malpractice. Personal injury. That kind of thing.

And we get off to a fine start, the Killer K’s do. Three straight wins to start the season, prompting Bill, my assistant coach, to pepper me with e-mails, once he finally gets up in the morning.

“Last night I had the girls work on catching,” he e-mails me about an early season practice I missed. “Coach Lorraine and Coach Gary hit to the girls in the outfield. I think we have a pretty decent team.

“Your daughter said I looked tired,” Coach Bill writes. “I think it’s just all the pressure.”

So going in, there were a lot of expectations. We have Coach Bill, sleeping late, dreaming of us making the World Series.

We have Coach Lorraine out of retirement to coach first base or whatever it is she does over there near first base.

As if that weren’t enough, we actually start off 3-0. There are a lot of expectations after you start off 3-0.

“Have you started to think,” Coach Bill e-mails me late one morning, “that maybe we could go undefeated?”

“No,” I tell him. “I have not thought that at all.

Sure enough, we lose our fourth game.

But the season continues along well, just the same. Before each game, the girls sit on the dugout bench shoulder to shoulder, tight as shish kebabs, listening to the pregame talk.

“Outfielders, where does the ball go?”

“The pitcher.”

“Where?”

“THE PITCHER!”

The girls hear about 5% of what we say, which is pretty impressive if you’ve ever heard what it is we say.

Mostly, they fidget and pull at their bubble gum and examine each other’s teeth, which is pretty normal ballplayer behavior.

The girls’ parents turn out to be a pretty spirited bunch as well.

At the first practice, the parents all joined in on the warmup calisthenics, twirling their arms, stretching their legs, doing the jumping jacks along with the kids, till we got to something somewhat difficult, at which time the parents all broke off into little groups and started talking about vacation plans and herbicides. Tomato plants. That new Audi.

“For a while there, I thought the parents wanted to play,” I told Coach Bill after the first practice.

“Especially that Mrs. Costello,” he said.

Since then our parents have been supportive, with just the right level of involvement.

They are supportive when we win. They are supportive when we lose.

They are supportive when the girls run the bases like Nancy Sinatra in go-go boots, high stepping from second base to third through the long spring grass, as if avoiding snakes.

They are supportive when I stand out on the field in my scruffy coaching clothes, eating sunflower seeds and gazing at the sky, like some daft camp counselor too long in the woods.

They are supportive when we lose to our archrivals, led by Coach Bob, a prominent and opinionated local attorney. Or the team led by Coach Mike, the guy with the big house.

The parents sit patiently in their bleachers, sipping those vaporous fluids, cheering us on, even cheering on the other team, looking at their watches, wondering how they’re ever going to get home at 8 o’clock and still make dinner and finish the kids’ homework and still find time to sew Merlin’s beard for school the next day.

Through it all, the parents have been supportive. But now the playoffs are about to begin. Suddenly, the stakes are higher.

And the Killer K’s are right in the hunt.

Next week: the big game.

*

Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.