By Gary Topping–
This week our blogger-in-chief Mike O’Brien enumerated some of the ways his unique style of parenting developed, given the absence during his formative years of his father’s role model. I was surprised to see so many similarities to myself. Like Mike’s wife Vicki, my wife Marianna pays all the bills and does much of the home maintenance (she lived there for over a decade before we got married and knows the house well). Like Mike, I never developed a taste for Scotch (it’s Marianna’s drink), nor do I play poker. I do play golf, but so badly that I’m sure a lot of onlookers wouldn’t consider it really golfing. Unlike Mike, though, I spent a summer coaching a Little League baseball team. It was a summer I’d like to forget.
Toward the end of my Ph.D. program at the University of Utah in the 1970s, one of my classmates, Bob Welsh, was teaching history at Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s School in Salt Lake City. Some woman there—another faculty member, I suppose—was running a league of Little League baseball teams and looking for coaches. Bob and I were both long-time baseball fans, and when he asked me if I’d like to share the coaching responsibilities, I (unwisely) agreed. We were assigned a team called the Wolves. To make things interesting, two more of our graduate student colleagues—George Pence (now a fellow Boy Monk blogger), and a Classics major named Terry Rocca—decided to join us as competitors and were assigned a team called the Pintos.
From the very beginning, it became apparent that none of our kids actually wanted to play baseball; they were there because their parents had been looking at too many Norman Rockwell paintings and decided that playing Little League baseball is what small boys do. Accordingly, attendance at practices was sporadic at best, meaning that our coaching was equally sporadic. When, at one practice, one of our least terrible players was absent and Bob inquired as to his whereabouts, the answer was, “He went to Primary” (the Mormon Church’s after-school program for elementary school kids). “PRIMARY??” Bob blew up. “This is BASEBALL”!
I myself had played a fair amount of sandlot baseball as a kid, but never Little League, and I learned to my dismay that Little League rules prohibit several pretty important baseball strategies: you can’t bunt, you can’t steal bases, and everybody who shows up has to be given a turn at bat. So we took advantage of the one strategy left to us: setting the batting order. We had one kid who was extra short, so he was our lead-off batter. Figuring that none of the opposing pitchers could hit such a small strike zone, we instructed him not to swing his bat; just take four bad pitches and head to first. The strategy counted on someone else down the batting order getting a hit and moving him around the bases. They never did, though, and three outs later he would be stranded at first.
As we lost game after game (including repeated losses to the Pintos, to George and Terry’s mounting mirth), our desperate fall-back strategy was to pray that fewer than nine of our players would show up, so that we could forfeit the game and avoid the humility of losing. It never happened: we always wound up with exactly nine players, and the results were dismally predictable. At every game, I felt like the celebrated manager Rocky Bridges: “I managed good, but boy did they play bad”!
But miracles do happen. At the very last game of the season, something went terribly wrong: we actually scored a run or two and pulled off a win, spoiling our season’s perfect record. It was anything but a Mickey Rooney ending, but we settled for it. I was so elated I felt like Walter Matthau at the end of The Bad News Bears, buying the kids a case of beer. Bob wisely overruled that idea, kept us out of jail, and we settled for a round of ice cream cones instead.
Adversity, they say, builds character. If so, I think Bob and I built enough character that if we had died at the end of that season, we would have had one-way tickets to Heaven. Instead, we decided that character building wasn’t worth its cost in sanity. We never again set foot on a Little League baseball diamond.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
