Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

 

I coached Little League Baseball back before everyone had a favorite font.

I was a volunteer, paid in experience.

Coaching was fun. I told my charges to have fun. That’s what it was all about and what it should be about. I assured them that playing baseball was more fun than underwater welding or putting a new roof on an outhouse.

Some people called baseball hardball to differentiate it from softball. Hardball was a good name. The game is hard. Hitting a speeding ball with a bat is hard. So is keeping a ball from being hit by a speeding bat. I didn’t encourage them to give 110%. That’s impossible. You can’t even give 100%. There will always be a nostril or little toe that refuses to participate. I told them to give it their best shot.

One year, there was a kid who was sorely lacking in baseball skills, who brought a big bag of sunflower seeds to each practice and game to share with teammates and coach. We voted him the most valuable player.

A T-shirt bearing the team’s name was as close as we came to a certificate of participation. Everybody got a shirt. A cheap T-shirt looks good on a kid. One year, a kid came to the first practice, got his shirt and quit before touching a baseball. He didn’t want any glory on the diamond. He just wanted a T-shirt.

Our home ballfield was a retirement area for stones. Each kid had to haul stones from the playing field before practice could begin. This removal limited the number of bad hops an infielder might need to endure. We did it after practice, too. One kid claimed he must have had rocks in his head to be willing to pick up so many stones, but we kept on rocking in the free world.

I enjoyed my time as the skipper. Nobody was seriously injured. There were no parents who thought the only thing keeping their son from a lucrative major-league baseball career was his lunkheaded Little League coach. They might have considered me an idiot, but they knew I wasn’t crimping the baseball career of a phenom.

I had good teams. We had great moments, amazing plays and big wins, but what did the players remember? They remembered the great car fire. My family had a tradition of being the last owner of every car we owned. Cars went directly from us to the junkyard once they’d lost their vigor. I had a 1961 Chevrolet Bel Air. That was fitting. There was a commercial jingle that went like this: “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, they go together in the good ol’ USA.”

My old car’s motto was: “Jumper cables — never leave home without them.” It had nearly as many dents as rust. In the small spaces between the rust there were three colors of metal. There was blue, blue-green and green-blue. The Chevy could rock, roll, rattle and rumble. I don’t know what it got for gas mileage, but I know it was much better heading downhill than going uphill. Because we didn’t have a luxurious team bus, the old Chevy was my baseball car. It carried bats, balls, extra gloves, catcher’s equipment, water jugs and players to practices and games. If I’d have been smart, I’d have bought a second car just like it. That way I’d have had one for driving and one for parts. That Chevy got by on the minimum number of parts.

One day, on our way back from a game, I found a proverbial worm in my proverbial apple. The floor of the jalopy had rusted through and allowed the floor’s carpet to come into contact with the exhaust system. It wasn’t a blazing fire, but the smoke was alarming and annoying. I pulled into a field drive and got the kids out of the car promptly. That went well considering we’d not had any fire drills. Today, cellphones would have been employed, rescue calls made and photos taken. We had a boy who imitated the siren of a fire truck. The fire was extinguished by water and Kool-Aid from the jugs and many handfuls of gravel. Carrying the stones from the ballfield had made the young baseball players effective firefighters.

Many of them played high school baseball. Some played in college. Some coached. None of them played Major League Baseball. For all of them, baseball stopped, but they kept going. A good number became volunteer firefighters. The great car fire was a good coach.

Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Saturday.