My Baseball Team 9/20/04

I can't remember the last time the air was so clean. It's like Ivan power-washed the eastern United States! It's unseasonably cool and unusually, perhaps uniquely, clear. I'm happy to report that our middle son arrived safely back in New Orleans after his unexpected but delightful hurricane-related visit home. I have a baseball team. Now, that’s not something everybody can say, and I wouldn’t be prouder or more filled with gratitude for my good fortune if my baseball team was a Major League franchise (well, maybe). I’ve been active in youth baseball at various levels for a long time, and have written about it a few times in this forum, but this will be the first time I’ve talked here about my baseball team. I didn’t come by my baseball team easily, but rather it is the result of the latest in what I’m beginning to realize is a long list of Bad Catholic Experiences to which I’ve referred in my header, but somehow haven’t been able to bring myself to discuss. Most of those Bad Catholic Experiences, which I believe have caused me and those I love some real harm, came to me through my husband and reach back into his childhood and to his three years in Seminary (they were merely exacerbated by his combat experience). The latest in this long line of Bad Catholic Experiences, the details of which I will save for another (braver) time, resulted in my youngest son, a promising catcher, attending an alternative private high school, one with no baseball team. It was a hard choice to make, and in retrospect it might not have been the right one, but it was a very unstable time for our family and I felt that this school could offer this child some protection and insulation, and that he needed it. His oldest brother had gone there for his last two years of high school, so I knew they had basketball and golf and had a good relationship with the Athletic Director. In the fall of 2002, when my youngest enrolled there as a freshman, I leveraged all of the baseball community equity I had accrued, and organized a team that was half kids from the alternative school. The local 18U league, of which I am a director, provided me with a group from another small school and we played in their fall recreational league, which was comprised of travel teams, high school JV and freshman teams, with a judicious sprinkling of varsity and varsity-caliber players. I started this project in 2002 and have continued to field my alternative school boys, with the help of the school’s administration, through teams in the spring and fall of ‘03, until now. By last spring, I had a team of all kids from the alternative school. Now, the path to this school is different for every child, but it’s rarely an easy one, and one might say that this particular “population” is, for lack of a better term, high-maintenance. Last spring, I had an odd mishmash of real ball players who would be playing baseball if they attended a mainstream high school and knew how to comport themselves in the dugout and on the field, and good athletes who hadn’t played much or hadn’t played for a while but just wanted to be out there, playing baseball. Up against JV teams coming out of their regular spring high school season, I told my boys at the beginning of last spring’s season that, for us, every game was a practice until the playoffs, and that if we could just not come in dead last, and avoid having to play the best team in the league in the opening round of the playoffs, I would promise them a run at the Championship. They believed me and we finished our regular season 4-9, one game out of dead last. We went from a complete disaster area of not showing up for games (or worse, arriving “impaired”), losing uniforms and not having equipment, to coming early for batting practice and found ourselves, with a little luck along the way, arriving through the winner’s bracket at the Championship game. Now, we didn’t win that Championship game last spring, and this isn’t sanctioned (*real*) high school baseball, but don’t tell my players that. It’s the only baseball these guys have and they played their hearts out for me. This past weekend couldn’t have been a more beautiful weekend for baseball, and our fall season opened, with a loss and a win. Now, my seven returning players were not in full playoff form (for that matter, neither was I), but the change in these young men from the start of last spring’s season is substantial, and I am proud of them. We’ve been joined by some old friends from Little League and travel ball, and two boys from other small private schools to fill out our fall roster. Some of them play varsity baseball, while some may be headed back to JV and are using this fall to try to improve. I think we’re going to be pretty good, but most importantly, I think we have a great combination of personalities and a good chance to have a positive dugout. I think we are going to have fun. It’s strange sometimes how things turn out differently than we expect. I would have loved seeing my youngest son play regular high school baseball, but if he had, I wouldn’t have a baseball team.