I watched my son’s coming of age last night. Our culture, lukewarm post-Protestant, offers no ceremony to mark this transition. But unmistakably I witnessed his rite of passage, lustrous beneath ballpark lights, as I sat on the aluminum slats of playground bleachers. I saw my 14-year-old and eight teammates play flawless baseball on a full-size diamond.
At first I did not realize that this was not just another game, but instead a coalescence of nine years on the ragged sod of a dozen school yards. Only in the sixth inning did I notice that my son’s team had committed no errors. The pitchers threw strikes; the hitters did not swing at bad pitches. Runners were thrown out trying to steal. There were two double plays. In the final inning, an opposing base-runner positioned himself as a decoy far off first base so his teammate might slip in to score from third. But on a signal, our team’s catcher ran toward the runner with the ball held high as the pitcher dropped back to cover home. Then the catcher made a cut-off throw to my son, the shortstop, who held the ball just long enough for the third-base runner to break irretrievably. The pitcher’s graceful sweep tag from my son’s perfect throw caught the runner by half a step. It was elegant baseball, a man’s game played with composure and passion by my son, who was still a child a few hours before.
As I watched, I thought about what had brought us to that moment. It began with a rubber ball in a pudgy hand and progressed as we tried, with limited success, to throw and catch without dropping from short distances three times, five times, 10. As years passed the soft plop in my mitt turned to a thud, a pop, then a stinging slap. Each catch, each throw, brought another molecule to the slowly forming crystal. I only dimly recognized then that these sessions were more than an exercise to build my son’s skills. Playing catch is a form of non-verbal communication with Taoist features, an act of being, connection and respectful separation, a subtly satisfying relationship between father and son. There is a touch of magic to the invitation, “Dad, let’s play catch.”
Before that night, his mother and I had watched games for nine years, most of them on a junior-size diamond. In the beginning there was T-ball. Mothers’ darlings swatted a rag ball from the top of a rubber pole, then scampered toward first base, as defenders watched the ball go by or occasionally picked it up and flung it in the runner’s general direction. No one kept score. (A friend who raised four boys claims to have had a mystical experience. In his vision the inmates of hell were condemned to watch T-ball for eternity. With the suddenness of St. Paul’s conversion, my friend reformed his life and ever since has been an exemplary citizen.)
With each passing year there were changes. The rag ball became a baseball. A pitching machine replaced the T. Then we endured games dominated by walked batters and passed balls as our 9-year-old enrolled in the “minors,” the first level at which children pitch. On his team, the Giants, the average height was 4 feet 1 inch. For the next three years he played in the “majors,” where in its best moments the game resembled real baseball about as much as a Shetland pony does a horse.
I was not one of those archetypal Little League fathers, pushing his malleable child for his own ego gratification. I ascribe this not to virtue but to abject incompetence. I did not have the requisite knowledge to know what to scream at him about. My baseball youth was trading cards and Brooklyn Dodger daydreams. My son, I had assumed, would be a bookish lad, always chosen last and permanently consigned to right field. I went along with his new mania, as I had his previous passions for dinosaurs, road-building equipment and model rockets, because I was not yet ready to lose more of him than I had to. (The day will be here soon enough when my role will be reduced to that of only an occasional no-sayer and a walking ATM.)
After decades of absence, my son led me back, a Gulliver journeying into once-familiar lands. I signed on to assist the shorthanded manager, then read books and watched instructional videos in an effort to make my participation something other than an embarrassment. I worked mainly with the children who, like me at their age, had not developed basic skills. As I breathed the Bermuda pollen and dust of the practice field, I watched those who knew more, and began for the first time to understand the game, the role of those who teach and where it might fit in the life of my boy.
Before, I had listened sympathetically to nostalgic exaltations of sandlot baseball, kids’ pickup games, played free from the interference of meddling adults. I now know such talk is twaddle. Most of baseball is counterintuitive. Without help from a knowledgeable adult, a child will not learn how to throw with his elbow “above” his shoulder; how to hit line drives by shortening his swing; how to execute a drag bunt; or how to add speed to his fastball by pulling back his gloved hand hard. As a child progresses, the refinements become more subtle and seemingly infinite. My son’s hitting improved markedly when one of his coaches noticed and corrected his penchant for rolling his wrists before, not after, his bat had made contact with the ball.
The variety and subtlety of the skills to be learned distinguishes baseball from sports such as basketball and football, in which college stars commonly become first-string players their first year in the NBA or NFL. Unlike those sports, each major league baseball franchise must be supported by a myriad of minor league teams, at a variety of levels, to teach and refine the skills of talented players. There are occasional exceptions, of course. With his 100-m.p.h. fastball, 17-year-old Bob Feller jumped from high school to starting pitcher for the Cleveland Indians. But such prodigies come along as infrequently as a Heifetz in the school band. For the rest, learning is a painstaking process.
I had heard controversy about Little League coaches before; now I met them. My tenure as a Little League board member exposed me to “managers” with physical appearances as diverse as a Walt Disney pirate crew-and skill levels still more varied. Along with some very good coaches, I encountered misplaced Napoleons and ineffectual nice guys who knew little about managing children and less about baseball. Yet I find myself defending all but the very worst of them with a vehemence that surprises me. The coaches who form this motley collection are at least trying to fulfill a traditional role of incalculable importance. They are what remains of the tribal elders who taught our forebears how to hurl a spear and stalk an antelope. The best of them approach the game with a combination of reverence and subdued excitement, as our ancestors did the hunt.
I use the hunt analogy for the same reason I have come to prefer baseball. Baseball is a life game. Other games mimic war: Their teams conduct maneuvers, invade the opposition’s territory and score by an act of conquest, traversing a line or penetrating a goal that represents the other team’s nationhood. In baseball the teams contest on the shared territory. As in our daily struggles, the players run the same base paths. There is no artificial time limit. The game takes as long as it takes. At the end, victory belongs to those who most frequently attain the common goal. A baseball crowd cheers accomplishment; blood lust is not in its lungs.
In baseball there is no hiding place for incompetence. Responsibility is visually individual. The batter stands alone at the plate. The pitcher either did or did not throw a strike. When the shortstop attempts a backhand grab, his success or failure can be seen from every seat. Yet despite this separateness, the team transcends the individual skills of the nine who share the field. An invisible bond joining the widely spaced players shows itself inexplicably when a diving catch in right field inspires a teammate leading off the next inning. In a good team, qualities of pride and unity shine. In a team that has given up, we see the body language of defeat, a shared disease of the spirit.
I saw that, as in life, hours of training are necessary to perfect skills that may wait unused for most of the game, then become the
difference between victory and defeat when a sharp line drive triggers responses too swift for deliberate thought.
The most skillful team does not always win. A game can be decided on a bad hop, a checked-swing blooper or the angle from which the umpire makes a call. As one commentator said, baseball is a game of “ifs and inches.”
More than any other game, baseball teaches how life works. Over a long season, the championship team may win only 11 out of every 20 games and the batter who hits safely one-third of the time will find himself in the Hall of Fame. No player can count on winning a particular game simply because his team is more skilled or works harder than its opponent. But because, like much of what we do, baseball is won at the margins-by “ifs and inches”-the player can trust that with sufficient skill and unrelenting effort, his team can win more often than it will lose and so attain a triumph that best approximates what we can hope for in life.
The mentality of the baseball player must be different too. Although one hard-throwing relief pitcher claimed that he pitched like his “hair is on fire,” you cannot play baseball in an adrenaline fury. Those who do strike out, pitch wildly or throw over the first baseman’s head. To play baseball, you must learn to relax and concentrate, to be alert but contained. A good baseball head is a level head. The players who make it are not those who show flashes of brilliance, but those who establish consistency. There are many lessons baseball doesn’t teach-including several vital ones I wish my son would learn-but I watch his poise on the pitching mound after giving up two walks with a combination of trepidation, admiration and envy. Although he has let down his team, he is unbowed; all his concentration now is on the next hitter. When a child learns how to pitch out of a jam or how to be a good two-strike hitter, he has learned lessons that will carry beyond the ballpark.
Not all Little League coaches absorb enlightenment. Most notably, there are those who scream at umpires. In doing so, they mistake baseball for a war game, and in this delusion, they rail against the fates. When they do, they bungle a chance to teach one of the game’s valuable lessons. The umpire with an inconsistent strike zone will reappear in our children’s lives in the form of various customers, bosses, teachers and judges who see things from a different angle or who are, at times, plainly wrong. Just as life has taught us, we need to imbue in our children humility about the relative accuracy of their own perceptions and to accept such misfortunes with an outward show of grace and an inward redoubling of their determination; so that they play the next game so skillfully that no combination of accident or human imperfection can deprive them of victory.
But we should not smugly criticize Little League coaches for this shortcoming or righteously castigate some of them for their inability to teach rudimentary baseball skills. The tribal elders had advantages they do not. An established animistic religion or natural pantheism placed their lessons, like the hunt itself, in a broader religious unity. From their own tribal lives, the children already partook of the spirit. None of them was a latchkey kid from a one-parent home. Necessity eliminated great variations of teaching ability, because the skills the tribesmen taught were survival skills. There could be no carelessness in their play. A tribe that could not teach would not last, nor could a tribesman who did not learn expect to survive.
Whatever his defects, that plump man in shorts hitting fungoes to 10-year-olds on a summer afternoon participates in a tradition that is more vital than we may think. Our world would be less bitter, violent and confused if the mature males of our tribe would all assume the sacred responsibility of their forebears, whether in baseball, another sport, Scouting, chess or stamp collecting. The evidence mounts that without the intervention of such adults, our youth finds its own ways to band together in tribal groups, design uniforms, contest with rival bands and invent its own “rites of passage.”
Last night, after years of training, my son performed the life ritual as a man. In a primitive society, his transition would be complete; his physical skills exceed those of this older member of the tribe.
But in our world, despite the ceremony’s perfection, his triumph is limited. Today he needs a ride to the mall. In our technology-dominated agglomeration of subcultures, my son needs years of formal and informal training before he can be the broadly inquisitive, competent, compassionate adult I hope he will become. If this happens, it will be years from now, coming after many gradations with no bright line to mark the event.
I have come to a different age. I am a spectator now. My son’s skills long ago outstripped my capacity to teach. Tonight I will indulge myself. In my mind I will compress life’s struggles into a ritual game. From the bleachers I will watch him play with gratitude and awe.
