Diamonds In Mind

Bats And Balls And Fathers And Sons

Little League is starting up again. Tryouts were last week, and then the draft. It is my youngest son’s last year of eligibility, and I found out Friday evening that he is a Padre. I informed him of this Saturday morning when I went in to wake him up. He had no idea what I was talking about.

“William, you’re a Padre.”

Rubs his eyes. “What?”

He thought I was using some obscure term of familiarity, like compadre. I call him stuff like that sometimes. “You know, like the San Diego Padres. Mr. Dearing called, you’re on his team.” Dearing is someone I know, a good guy and excellent coach. Knowledgeable and even-tempered. I was glad it was him when I found out. My son was pleased, as well.

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People tend to get overly sentimental about baseball, especially about the part it plays in the relationship between a father and a son. The movie Field Of Dreams – which was twisted in this direction, away from the novel it is based on – is the best example of this. That novel, Shoeless Joe, was terrific; but almost entirely different in basic ways from the resulting movie, which I found pleasant, but not great. However, Field Of Dreams is useful in pointing out how some men feel about baseball, and their dads. Not me, but. . .

A father-son relationship can be complicated, and sometimes not so pleasant, especially during the child’s adolescence and young adulthood. That is my experience with my father. It was not an Oedipal thing, in the Freudian sexual sense. My father was funny and easy-going on the surface, but was by necessity the aloof authority figure in our two-parent family setup, and therefore a representation of repression to a son who was trying to break free and establish his own identity. Further complications arose from big expectations projected onto me by him. But I am getting off the subject here, and out of my depth. Simply put, a father-son relationship does not have to be overtly ambivalent, but sometimes it is.

The thing with baseball is, it can be a neutral ground in this conflict. A love for the game, passed on by a father to his son and nurtured by a mutual interest, can be a place of respite in an otherwise turbulent relationship at the time, and/or a way to resolve old conflicts later on, when both the son and his dad are presumably more mature and can look at their relationship with a greater sense of equanimity. Even if the father-son interaction is not openly difficult, there is almost always a distance there, I am not sure why. Baseball can be a way to bridge that distance, at least for a little while.

My relationship with my own sons is far from perfect, but not nearly as crazy as mine was with my dad, for many reasons. Our baseball relationship has been steady but not so intense, partly because our conflicts outside of baseball are not large, and also because I have consciously de-emphasized my own place in my kids’ baseball lives. We go to games and talk about baseball and I have tried to pass on to them the knowledge I have from playing from childhood through high school, but I have never formally coached them, and never will. This is again in reaction to personal experience, as my own father’s and my relationship, already tenuous in my teenage years, was almost destroyed forever by the two seasons he decided, against my tacit wishes, to be my Senior League coach.

For all the gauzy good feeling about baseball and paternal relationships, I have seen real ugliness in youth baseball. Even as kids, we used to make fun of the minority of the dads who would get all worked up about the games and yell and scream and stuff. Even if they were our own. We used to call them ‘railing dads’ because during games, instead of sitting in the stands with everyone else, they would group along the fence rails behind the first- and third-base lines, and mutter to each other and yell at the kids and coaches and umpires on the field. We thought they were fucking nuts; and we resolved to never be that way ourselves, when we grew up.

I have kept that resolution, but it has cost me. I’ve never formally coached either of my boys, as I said, and I have restrained my natural passion at their games, for fear of becoming like those railing dads.

But apparently, not everyone has kept the promises we made, as kids. I have seen a new generation of overbearing fathers at games, hovering over everything like a dark cloud at a picnic. And though I have restrained myself, I have at least a passing familiarity with the ugly, creepy feeling that comes when you realize you are way too wrapped up in a kids game, probably because in some way you are trying to relive your own glory days vicariously through your children; or, even worse, you are depending on your child out there, standing in the outfield watching an airplane fly over instead of the action on the field. . . you are burdening your own sweet child with the task of redressing your failures in baseball, and making up for your own shortcomings playing a game. That is a sick feeling, and it kind of scares me.

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One other thing people tend to do when discussing baseball is over intellectualize it. Like I have been doing here, for practically this entire post. Because for all the heavy theorizing, the real pleasures of baseball are mostly simple and visceral and tactile. Yesterday afternoon, between church and a Boy Scouts meeting, my son and I decided we should go to the schoolyard and throw the ball around, to start getting ready for the upcoming season. I still enjoy playing catch with him and his brother, even though I have a frayed rotator cuff now, and every time I throw the ball it feels like my arm is going along with it.

We gathered up some balls in the garage and our gloves and we walked to the schoolyard down the street. Once we got there, we stood maybe ten yards apart and started throwing the ball to each other, in a smooth, easy motion. Once we got warm, and started throwing with some velocity, we heard the familiar sound of the ball popping the leather of our gloves. I could imagine that, from a distance, it appeared we were engaging in a sort of reciprocal dance, a basic instinct to throw, and then catch. . . catch, and then throw. Just like it has been done for so many springs, and probably will be for many more.

Just a boy and his dad, standing out in the late afternoon sun on the yellow-green grass of a schoolyard, tossing a ball back and forth and talking and laughing. Sharing the simple joy of throw-and-catch, of mindless banter, and of spending some time together, however brief, out in the sweet sunshine.

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