That Starts With "T" And That Rhymes With "P" And That Stands For... Um... Pee

Last Saturday when I posted some pictures from Little League Opening Day, I failed to mention that the boys in the red uniforms belong to the T-Ball team I'm managing this year. That's right, managing. I'm their manager. Actual children will learn the ins and outs of baseball from me.

The five-year-old me is laughing his head off right now, because the five-year-old me hated playing baseball. As did the eight-year-old me. The ten-year-old me said he couldn't play baseball until he finished a book on how the play baseball (thirty-eight-year-old me still hasn't finished that book just yet). The twelve-year-old me thought eating huge bowls of ice cream and watching reruns of McHale's Navy after school was a sport.

I think you get the idea.

When our first son went through T-Ball, I was still pretty new to the parenting side of the whole organized sports scene and didn't have the nerve to volunteer to coach. But I've helped out a couple years with the older one's Little League teams since then, so when the soon-to-be five-year-old (just three more days to go!) signed up for T-Ball this year, I sent in paperwork saying that I would help coach his team. Not manage his team, just help coach it. I didn't what to be too tied up with T-Ball because I also signed up to help coach the nine-year-old's (much more interesting to watch) Little League team again (turns out his team already had enough coaches, thank you very much).

Plus I didn't want to manage a T-Ball team because, well, that would just be plain crazy.

Still, when the message came down from Little League HQ a few weeks later, it was for me to come out the the next board meeting and get the names of my coaches and my players.

I've lucked out that some fathers offered up their help, including one guy who actually teaches high school gym for a living and who really should probably be the manager. For most of these guys (even the phys ed guy) it's their first exposure to Little League as a parent, so they don't know what a real manager looks like.

That so works in my favor.

We've had a couple practices already and the phrase that keeps popping into my head is "cat herding." The list they gave me says I that I should have ten kids on my team, but it's got to be closer to forty or fifty or a hundred. There's no way ten kids run around this much. The kids are just as clueless as their manager and they're all pretty hilarious.

So, tonight was our first real game and I'm happy to report that I only got clubbed in the head once. We played three innings - an inning being one time through the lineup each. Everybody hits. No matter how many time they knock the tee over.

And over. And over. And over.

The kids all started out enthusiastic and relatively focused, but any sign of interest was gone by the middle of the third. That's when every player on my team insisted that they had to go pee at the same time.

Every. Single. Kid.

By the time they returned from the port-a-potty and took the field for the bottom of the third, we had lost them. Playing in the dirt, waving to their little sisters, looking everywhere but at the batter.

And wouldn't you know it - the game ended in a tie (I predict a season full of tied games) - but everyone seemed to have fun anyway. I've figured out that the kids (and most of the parents) don't realize that I'm clueless. The kids just want to have fun (and hit the ball, and run the bases, and run the bases, and run the bases, boy howdy do they love running those bases) and the parents are just glad it's not them out there coaching.

They don't know what they're missing.

Comments

[Donna]

T ball is the BEST! I miss it. If you want to have some fun, make sure you tell the kid on 3rd to run home. See how many take off in the general direction of their house :]. It becomes every parent's favorite 'awwww' story from that point on.

[Donna]

T ball is the BEST! I miss it. If you want to have some fun, make sure you tell the kid on 3rd to run home. See how many take off in the general direction of their house :]. It becomes every parent's favorite 'awwww' story from that point on.

[Frank]

That is a beauty pic...the big hats, the smiles, the looking at the grass...beauty...

[Janie]

You truly are such a good daddy. I wanna come to a T-Ball game to catch you in action.