True Ancestor

The Dream-Making Machinery of "Cooperstown"

Driving across the Eastern half of the United States with a passel of kids is an object lesson in land planning, transportation, parenting, patience -- and awe. A vast stretch of the drive arrows through open farm land, which begins to pitch and roll in western Ohio. More than one third of the drive from Chicago to Oneonta, New York -- which covers almost exactly 800 miles -- takes place within the state of New York, whose western and west-central valleys are shrouded in cloud and spotted with farms and moribund mill and manufacturing towns.

None of this prepares you for the odyssey that is Cooperstown -- a name which, in classic real estate practice, pours past the borders of the town proper and overflows onto the hungry hamlets that want and need to cash in. Such is the nature of baseball, and the industry it supports, that Oneonta, some 30 miles south of Cooperstown, sports a facility that calls itself "Cooperstown All Star Village" and which hosts a dozen week-long summer baseball tournaments for teams of 12-year-old boys from all over the country.

All Star Village's eight fields are immaculate miniatures of a major league facility: chalked-in foul lines embrace pea-gravel warning tracks and carefully mowed outfields around a pristine dirt-and-grass diamond. The drainage systems under these fields make it possible for games to be played even minutes after downpours -- a frequent occurrence in this moody, Appalachian ecosphere. Parents of kids on opposing teams are caged into segregated bleachers, next to the dugouts of their respective teams. This makes it harder for the parents to engage in confrontations while still being within earshot of their loved ones (and their coaches).

The fields sit at the foot of a steep hill, and tractor-drawn haywagons haul the fat and the disappointed back up the hill after games. The kids stay with their coaches in bunkhouses in the Players Village -- living, eating and sleeping baseball, away from the exhortations and scoldings of parents (and the prying eyes of pedophiles, I suppose). Parents are allowed into the village for one two-hour visiting period; otherwise, they see their boys only at games, or if they check the kid out of the village for a movie, a meal or some R&R.

For fun, the kids have a swimming pool, an arcade, and about 200 other kids from around the country to play with. There's serious work to be done, however, and there are batting cages where swings are readied prior to the 32 or more games played every day.

These are 21st century kids, though: they not only make prank calls, they do it from their cell phones, where they record the calls and upload them to YouTube. I'm not at all proud to say Gabe, hectored the helpless employee of a sandwich shop with his imitation of Stewie from Family Guy, then menaced someone else with a kind of Ricardo Montalban patois. The calls are preserved here, for some reason (click on "prank calls").

Each player comes to All Star Village with a supply of custom-made pins bearing his team's logo. The boys feverishly set about trading pins, collecting one from each of the 23 other teams in their tournament. I don't know who came up with this, but it's a fiendishly clever way to get the boys familiar with the other teams and kids (while stimulating the economy).

The games themselves are six innings long (or an hour 55 minutes, whichever takes longer). In our tournament, Gabe's team won 3 and lost 5, including two losses to the eventual tournament champion, the Palm Desert Toros, a group of 12-year-olds that probably could beat the Seattle Mariners straight up. California, Texas and Florida teams tend to play year round. The kids are terribly good, but one fears not only for their enthusiasm for the game but for their rotator cuffs, too.

Most kids are great sports and well-behaved -- "giving five" to opposing players who've just cleared the fences -- but there's inevitably at least one team that engages in trash-talking, much to the delight of its parental spectators. One team sported a first baseman estimated at 230 pounds, who hit a line-drive home run that surely would have killed any outfielder who tried to catch it. His tags on pickoff throws were so hard that kids on our team came away with bruises. Some teams' parents come equipped with percussion instruments and rehearsed cheers that can damn near kill your enthusiasm for the sport.

Every tournament is scheduled so that each team has time to make the pastoral journey up to Cooperstown proper and pay homage at the shrine known as the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The kids all visit the displays that feature their favorite teams (sadly, in our case it was the Cubs). The coach then led the kids to and let them climb the fence of Abner Doubleday Field, one of the oldest baseball fields in the U.S. and the self-appointed "shrine" to the game. "I knew it was against the law, but some laws just have to be broken," the coach said. The local constabulary was not amused, but the kids sure were.

The Hall of Fame itself was something of a disappointment. Located beyond a skein of t-shirt and memorabilia shops, the Hall overwhelms with its fussiness, and the PR bonhomie with which it breezes past the Steriod Era and its arch-villains to tout the sanitized saints of the game. Simply put, there's too much BS, and too much for kids to look at: too many shrunken baseballs and faded uniforms, too little video, and too little of the darker side of the big business of sport. The plaques to the Hall's members are mounted in a hushed, cathedral-like setting that's just short of comical in its sanctimoniousness.

Four of us dads rented a house -- really, it was just a trailer on a slab -- about seven miles from the baseball complex. Here, we were perched up high on 35 acres: us, a firepit, a 3-bedroom trailer and a grill. This afforded the primitive pleasures of drinking beer and criticizing the coaches, lounging under a canvas of stars and around a blazing fire, surrounded by a traffic-jam of fireflies. The flashes of the nightly thunderstorms, and the thrilling arc of the occasional shooting star, were no match for the fireflies, whose brilliance was the more astonishing because of its complete silence.

For fun we . . . watched baseball!, trooping into Oneonta to watch the Tigers of the New York-Penn league play at a revamped and intimate Damaschke Field (below) that felt more timeless and more present than Doubleday.

On our last night, we had all the kids and parents up to our double-wide. We barbecued dogs and burgers, guzzled beer (the kids stuck to Gatorade), and made s'mores over another roaring fire. To entertain themselves, the kids brought a bat and rubber ball and -- what else? -- played baseball until it was too dark to see. Watching them run improvised bases and smack the ball into the weeds and woods was a primeval pleasure.

What has stayed with me -- more than the baseball, the shrines, the kids and their careening joy at being the center of attention in a game of skill and chance -- is the unchanged and unchanging nature of the central New York landscape. It makes sense that baseball is enthroned here: there's nothing else. Like baseball, the landscape has cosmetic differences but an unchanging, almost regal nonchalance about it. Time moves its tiny metronome but is forbidden its grander gestures. The ghosts come out of the woods to watch every game.

It's been built. And come they do.

--T.A.

Road Trip!

Gabe and I begin a road trip to Cooperstown later this week -- well, actually, Oneonta. But in the grand tradition of real estate marketing, anything within a 50-mile radius of Cooperstown calls itself Cooperstown. Cooperstown is an idyllic little American village which houses both the baseball and soccer halls of fame, and has moved from calling itself the birthplace of baseball to the loftier and more profitable home of baseball.

Gabe will be playing in a week-long tournament at All Star Village, one of the area's giant baseball establishments catering to 12-year-olds and their fathers suffering fevered dreams of stardom for their above-average kids. He'll play two games a day for at least three days against teams from Kentucky, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Many of these kids will look like they're 16, and they'll hit our pitching like they were hitting off a tee.

I'm driving out with another dad and two kids. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of road trips -- an experience that may soon go the way of all flesh, given the price of gas. When you look at a map, you see that more than a third of the driving takes place within the state of New York, whose rolling hills and Appalachian affect I remember from summer camp.

I'll do my best to send a dispatch from our rental house -- which has WiFi! It's out in the country, seven miles from the baseball "factory," a glorified trailer plopped in the middle of 34 deserted acres, backing up to a state park. There, these two other dads and I will grill flesh and drink beer, bemoan the fate of our team and our youth, and get devoured by flying insects as another day of our life circles the drain.

I can't wait.

--T.A.

When you're up close at a baseball game,

you can see the distrust and loathing cross the players' mostly stoic faces as they come within earshot of the fans. You can see what the players and coaches do in the dugout when they think no one is watching: razzing opposing players and coaches, ogling women in the stands, imitating teammates' batting stances. And spitting -- lots of spitting.

You can see how the fans howl insults and pleas for attention in the same breath. "You suck! Throw me a ball!"

You can see how big and how specialized a professional athlete is. Every muscle, every piece of equipment, every tic, is, like every inch of the field, carefully considered, created and calibrated for the prevailing conditions.

You can see how the modern ballpark is built to distract us from the fact that we're not watching the game on TV. The frequent musical interludes, the cavorting mascots, the inane between-inning contests, the ADD-inducing scoreboard are all meant to function like commercials in real time, so that you're tempted to spend money on the products that cross your field of vision, and so that you don't have to concentrate on anything for an extended period.

However, with all that said: sitting in really good seats, with Gabe and two of his friends, and seeing a well-played ballgame, was a real MasterCard moment. The kids were so stunned by these seats they started waving hello to the ballplayers. "Hey, Mr. Young! Hello! Ozzie! Hey Ozzie: Hi!!!" The speed of the pitches, and the batted balls, made them yelp with terror and excitement.

And two majestic home runs by the hometown boys -- two rainbow arcs down the left-field line -- made them howl in glee, and high-five the guys behind them, who by this time were so drunk that the boys instantly became their new best friends.

Gabe got thrown a t-shirt by some nubile, dancing representative of Chevrolet. His buddy Jeremy, who'd never gotten a major-league ball in his life, got a ball tossed to him by one of the Minnesota Twins' coaches.

Last night, the game was replayed on a local cable channel. We watched it again, because, when the camera on the third-base line focused on a left-handed hitter, Gabe and his friends were clearly visible, two rows above the Twins' dugout. He loved watching himself on TV, having a great time with his friends, in the same picture frame as a major-league ballplayer (mercifully, I was just out of camera range most of the time). He got to watch a great ballgame twice in one day, he got a t-shirt from a cute girl, and he got to see himself on TV.

I hate to say it but:

Priceless.

--T.A.

Season of our Liberation --or End of Days?

When, within the space of a few days, in the thawing Midwest,a wild cougar appears and people are rattled in their beds by an earthquake, it can be safely be said that we're living in interesting times. Need more proof?

• When the Cubs and Sox have near-identical records -- and sit at or near the top of their respective divisions;
• When an African American man and a white woman are vying for the presidential nomination of a major party;
• When the announcement of dismal financial results is deemed by the markets to be good news because the results aren't as dismal as they could have been;
• When a baby with two faces is born,
• And a woman survives a gunshot between the eyes;
• When a man, living with a transplanted heart, kills himself in the same way as the heart donor did;
• When the Pope meets abuse victims face to face,
• A praying passenger is removed from a commercial flight,
• And Jimmy Carter meets with leaders of Hamas;
• When a blind woman makes a hole in one
• And a deaf player scores in the NBA,

well, then, my friends, these are interesting times, indeed.

Chag Sameach/Happy Passover and a season of liberation to one and all --

--T.A.

Random stuff I just wanted to share, all crammed into one post

• My brother has written a novel! And gotten it published! I've bought 15 copies -- one for me, 14 for the only people I know who aren't related to me and still speak to me. I'm sure that if they stop speaking to me, my brother's writing won't be at fault.
• I've had an essay published in this book. A pretty interesting book, if you're into that sort of thing.
• Charles Martin explores Buddhism (and some other things) in a revived blog that I'm sure will be worth reading. So I've added it to my Best of Blogolalia list.
• Rabbi Daniel Landes, co-founder and director of the PARDES Institute, a renowned multi-denominational center of Jewish study in Jerusalem, coined a phrase that I'm going to have made into bumper stickers: Jews for Exegesis.
• He also invoked the Talmud as proof that Jews of radically different backgrounds could speak to each other -- even across centuries and continents. So why are Jews of different backgrounds having so much trouble speaking to each other today?, he asked.
• Here's a doctor who says the only way to level the athletic playing field is to permit and regulate steroid use. He's been called "the loneliest man on the planet." And far worse.
• That Airborne stuff actually works.
• Hardest things I've ever done: 1) Meditate 2) Be a step-parent 3) Go onstage as Banquo's ghost, during a high-school matinee, drenched in chocolate syrup (it looks like blood under stage lights), and wearing only white body paint and a G-string. I think the director had it in for me. I looked like a sundae with legs.
• Funniest thing Gabe ever said: "Why is Uncle Dick named after a private part?"
• Middle Daughter is off on her journey to save the world again. She's the "World Traveler" on the family blog-roll.
• Oldest Daughter has an intimidating internship with the Federal District of this outfit.
• I haven't the slightest idea who I'm going to vote for in my state's primary. Tell me: who's fiscally conservative, understands the gravity and staying power of the threat from radical Islamic terror, recognizes that working men and women have their backs to the wall as never before, and knows what to do about it; has the guts, and the brains, to address health insurance, immigration, housing, and begin to revive our crappy reputation and foreign policy, without being beholden to special corporate or religious interests; and has the brains, the political capital and the respect necessary to assemble a top-flight Cabinet? And who isn't a TOTAL CREEP?!
• If I were Donovan McNabb, I wouldn't want to finish my career before I had the chance to flatten Terrell Owens before a national television audience.
• And if I saw Roger Clemens, I'd offer him this.

--T.A.

An ideal night at the old ballyard

Last night, I had a perfect evening at the ballpark with two of my favorite people.

One was a young man whom I met when he was an inner-city kid who received a fellowship that took him to work for a summer with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. I've known this man (whom I'll call Kendall just to preserve his privacy) for eight years now. I became something of a mentor to him and have done my best to help him through more ups and downs than most people of my acquaintance admit to in a lifetime.

The other favorite person with me was Gabe who, at about 6 weeks shy of his 12th birthday, moves into a ballpark like a netted dolphin being re-released into the ocean.

The game started at 6:05, but Kendall, Gabe and I arrived early so Gabe could run around to the left field bleachers and try to shag batting-practice homeruns. He'd brought an indelible-ink marker so he could seek autographs; he came equipped with his baseball glove, a White Sox hat and sunglasses, because left field looks straight into slanting rays of the sinking afternoon sun.

Kendall and I stood a few rows behind Gabe, trying to converse, but batted balls kept screaming down at us from the upper atmosphere, rocketing off the seats and the concrete stairs. We moved to stand side by side so we could keep our eye on Gabe and on the meteoric baseballs at the same time.

Men jostled for position when a ball descended toward them from behind a scrim of bright sunlight. Once or twice, a fan with a glove would lunge in front of another fan just in time to snatch a souvenir away from him.

Then a ball was hit, and it was clear from the moment it left the bat that it was headed right for Gabe, who, standing in the first row behind the White Sox left-field bullpen, was about 350 feet from home plate. No one moved to jostle with him, and like an expert outfielder, he held up his glove, called out, "I got it!," and gloved it almost casually. Fellow souvenir-hunters applauded him. We got while the gettin' was good.

It had been a humid day, but as evening settled in, the clouds were chased away by a gentle breeze from the north. Mark Buehrle, the Sox' aging ace, pitched against Roy Halladay, the ace of the Blue Jays' staff. Both pitchers worked quickly and efficiently, and the game was over in just a little over two hours. The only runs were scored thanks to the efforts and enthusiasm of Danny Richar, the new Sox second baseman playing in his first major-league game, and Jerry Owens, a rookie center fielder, whose first big-league home run scored Richard ahead of him and the Sox won 2-0. The White Sox now only vaguely resemble their 2005 championship version. That's probably a good thing.

Kendall sat to my left, Gabe sat to my right. We were surrounded by colorful characters. During one lull in the action -- a collective moment of disbelief when the home-plate umpire missed what should have been a called third strike -- two men cried out in unison: Hey, Ump: Get off your knees! You're blowing the game! Non-parental adults laughed, while parents turned towards their children and said firmly that they weren't going to explain that particular joke. I explained it to Gabe anyway. He thought it was hysterical.

Directly in front of us sat a young man, maybe in his mid to late 20S, with his date next to him. The guy was fairly well built, but was wearing neither a belt nor underwear, so we were treated not only to a fine ballgame but a sterling show of Plumber's Butt for the entire evening. Gabe was tempted to try to throw a nacho chip so that it stuck in the young buck's butt-crack, but I told him that a true Sox fan only assaults umpires, not other fans.

The post-game fireworks show was timed and "choreographed" to snippets of well-worn classics like Blue Danube and Ravel's Bolero. From where we sat, the fireworks trailed down and seemed to drape themselves over a full moon, rising red over Lake Michigan. And as we drove home, the magisterial skyline of the Loop seemed to stand on tip-toe, looking for the first fireworks of Venetian Night.

For all the wonders of this summer, this was the best, most restorative evening of the season; the kind that makes time take a breather. The gifts of a ball dropping toward Gabe's glove, and the trailers of the fireworks dropping toward the ascending Moon, descended gently toward us without a care in the world.

--T.A.

Religion and Sports -- where all is not as it seems

The recurrent scandals in sports and religion are actually part of the same phenomenon: the exploitation of our desire to be united in amazement, by people who realize there's power and money to be had.

Barry Bonds is not a pedophile priest. He's a guy who realized that he could exploit wonder for personal gain. He was aided and abetted by people who more closely resemble pedophile priests -- his "trainers," his agent, and officials of Major League Baseball, who encouraged Bonds in his quest for deification because it would help them accrue money and power, when in fact the cultivation and sharing of amazement was their job.

Pedophile priests are seekers after power and possession. The priesthood has for centuries been the favored sanctuary of those who need trusting souls on which to prey. Whether these priests become perverted in or by the priesthood, or whether their perversion made them seek the priesthood out, isn't a topic I can address, but I think I can safely surmise that the architecture of holy bureaucracy whetted their appetites and provided walls behind which they could perpetrate and conceal their sins.

Cheating athletes and pious rapists violate an unspoken contract between us and those we choose to elevate: instead of sanctifying the experience of communal amazement, they exploit it. Instead of celebrating life, they defile it. And instead of leading us in exercises of self-renewal, they betray us.

The late Renaissance scholar and baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti understood that wonder was on the wane in baseball and in all of American life. In his bright, shiny paean to the essence of sport, Take Time for Paradise, Professor Giamatti said he thought sports represented not our desire to be closer to the gods, but to be god-like. The difference between sports and religion was crucial:

I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of each other and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know. Whether celebrated by Pindar or Roger Angell, sport is, however, ultimately subversive of religion because while it mimics religion's ritual and induces its fanaticism and sensation, sport cares not at all for religion's moral strictures or political power or endless promises.

That last sentence may or may not have been true when Giamatti wrote it, almost 20 years ago, but it's certainly not true now. In fact, sports is exactly like much organized religion today, not in its moral uprightness but in using a grave pseudo-morality to hide its more cynical goals of self-enrichment and self-perpetuation. Sport has become a church, and the fiercely political, pseudo-spiritual bureaucracy of churchdom has become sport: in their accrual of fanatical devotion, their hollow and patently hypocritical moral posturing, and most certainly in their thirst for power, church and sport are blood brothers.

Greek athletic festivals, Giamatti notes, had religious connotations and featured religious ritual, and it's mostly from the Greeks that we inherit and intuit the connection between the Divine and the divinely human. But that connection has frayed, because instead of striving to be closer to the Divine, we honor those who more closely impersonate it. With apologies to J.K. Rowling, it's conjurers, not wizards, that are our national heroes.

We've increasingly reserved our wonder for feats of athleticism because we came to believe we couldn't trust anything but our eyes. And now, too late, we realize that our eyes have been suckered, along with the rest of us.

--T.A.

No-Hitters Matter

Last night, I was home with Gabe, while the One True Wife and Middle Daughter were out running errands. Gabe was decompressing by watching some awful movie on the Disney Channel; I was upstairs in the kitchen, trying to learn Hebrew.

My cell phone kept ringing. It was upstairs. I think of my cell phone as an office appurtenance. I don't want to have to run for it at home. Try me at home first. Then, if you can't reach me and you really need to, try the cell. Damn, intrusive thing. Buzzing like some fly trapped in a jar. I hate you. Bring me some good news, for once.

Gabe was getting ready for bed, and I went up and checked the White Sox score. The web site said Mark Buehrle was through 8 innings of no-hit ball. I checked my cell phone. It was my sister (#3, who's getting married this weekend); she'd been trying to reach me to tell me what was going on. Gabe and I ran downstairs and turned on the TV.

Watching that last inning was like watching the last out of the '05 World Series. Everyone was on their feet, hollering, the steam coming out of their mouths and fogging the air. The batters looked fierce, determined -- and scared. Mark Buehrle later said his knees were trembling during the last two innings.

I remember the last White Sox no-hitter, in 1991. I was in the most miserable period of my life, and I was in my tiny studio apartment as a rookie pitcher from Venezuela named Wilson Alvarez bewildered the Baltimore Orioles for nine innings. Watching him do that made me feel good. It revived me. How else can I explain it?

After Joe Crede, the White Sox third baseman, fielded a slow roller and threw out the runner for the last out, the Sox players mobbed Buehrle; Gabe and I hooted and hollered. A cloud had been lifted. This psycho chump with his guns in his hands and his chips on his shoulders and his video cameras had nothing on us. He's gone; we're not. We got to see a little slice of immortality unfurl last night.

Things that make us feel good without hurting anybody else -- those things matter.

To me and Gabe, anyway, last night mattered.

--T.A.

Proof That There Is No God

A pitcher for the LA Dodgers owns a parcel of land that turns out to be worth billions.

OK, so he's only made seven major league appearances in nine years. Still, to even manage that, you've gotta be supremely talented.

And even if he's a fringe Major League player, he's got to have more money than all of us put together.

But no, that's not enough. In a story worthy of The Beverly Hillbillies, he buys a parcel of land for his aunt that turns out to have a ridculously valuable mother lode of countertop-quality rock on it.

No deity in Its right mind would give some guy both a gem of a left arm and acres of priceless stone. That just makes the rest of us, who labor to improve our world and our souls, feel like, well ...

Schist.

--T.A.

Gabe Dons the Tools of Ignorance

As part of his initiation into serious sports (talk about your oxymorons), Gabe will be asked to play several positions on his travel baseball team this year: first base, outfield, pitcher -- and catcher. This last was a little unexpected, because Gabe is left-handed.

Gabe already loves catching. He likes being in the middle of the action, with all kinds of gear on, trying to help the pitcher spot his pitches, trying to nail base-runners. He's enamored of his new left-handed catcher's mitt: he's oiled it twice and jammed a ball into its thick, deep pocket, then sandwiched the glove into his middle dresser drawer to get it to form nicely around the ball.

Did you know there hasn't been a left-handed-throwing catcher in the Majors since Jack Clements hung up the "Tools of Ignorance" in 1900, after a 17-year career? I looked into this because Gabe asked about it. Turns out there's some scholarly research on the subject (H/T: John Walsh of the Hardball Times).

REASONS LEFTIES DON'T CATCH:

• Difficulty throwing a runner out at second with a right-handed batter at the plate. This theory holds that, since right-handed batters are more common, a left-handed catcher would frequently have to "throw through" a batter whose position in the right-handed batter's box could interfere with a throw to second. Why this is nonsense: left-handed batters are way more common than in the old days, so a lefty catcher wouldn't face this as often as he once did. Furthermore, research shows that runners have the highest rate of success stealing when both pitcher and batter are right-handed. (Of course, you can't look up stats on lefty catchers: there aren't any to keep stats on.) Since the righty catcher-righty batter throw is supposed to be the less obstructed one, the whole "throwing-through" issue can't be that significant.
• Difficulty throwing out a runner stealing third. A left-handed catcher would have to swivel his body to make the throw, while a right-handed catcher's body is already lined up to do so. Why this is nonsense: if there's a right-handed batter up, that batter can partly obstruct the throw to third from a righty. Not so for a lefty. Plus: a lefty catcher would have an easier pick-off throw to first.
• The lefty throw "moves" more. Everbody's throw moves. The problem is that most infielders will not be used to the "reverse" movement of a lefty throw coming from home. A righty throw tends to bend toward the first-base side of the bag; a lefty throw would bend the opposite way. Why this is nonsense: If you make a hard, accurate throw, it doesn't matter which hand the ball comes out of.
• Trouble tagging out a runner on a close play at the plate. A lefty catcher has to bring the glove across his body, while blocking the plate, to get a tag down. A righty catcher's left hand -- the glove hand -- is already there. Why this is nonsense: How often will that be an issue?
• Scarcity of left-handed catcher's mitts. No longer an issue.

The lefty catcher would also have two significant advantages: throwing to first after fielding bunts and nubbers, especially up the third-base line; and catching the breaking balls of right-handed pitchers, which would break toward his gloved hand.

And now, the venerable baseball statistician Bill James, on the issue of left-handed catchers:

The notion that a left-handed person could not be a major league catcher is absurd...The biggest reason there are no left-handed catchers is natural selection. Catchers need good throwing arms. If you have a kid on your baseball team who is left-handed and has a strong arm, what are you going to do with him?

The answer, of course, is that you're likely to make him a pitcher.

Not that I have my hopes up or anything. Catcher is the most physically punishing position in baseball. You're weighted down with all this equipment, you're getting foul balls off your noggin, runners are plowing into you, you're squatting uncomfortably for many minutes at a time; plus, Gabe is a kid who received the very limited athletic gifts of the One True Wife and me (and that most obnoxious breed, the "Little League Aficionado," has let it be known that no kid on this team is startlingly gifted); still, what a hoot it's going to be to see him strap all that stuff on and gun down some ninny trying to steal on him.

Ah, Spring: when an old man's mind turns to thoughts of Little League baseball.

--T.A.