The Little League Debacle

When I was very young a baseball craze was underway in the US. Baseball was an extremely popular sport and universally regarded as “America’s sport”. Football, basketball, hockey and other international team sports like soccer and Lacrosse were unheard of in American culture. All were overshadowed by the baseball phenomena. It was all about baseball!

The Little League had been established in the US in 1939 and by the 1950’s was a major pastime for school aged boys of the era. My Dad, I was told, was a pretty good athlete as a young man and was also a big baseball fan. Living in New Jersey naturally the team to root for was the New York Yankees. This was the era of Mickey Mantle who played from 1951 to 1968 and he followed a long string of New York Yankee greats including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford. The NY Yankees “owned” the World Series during those years.

Naturally my Dad encouraged me to play baseball. He taught me to throw, catch and bat and initially I was all in on the game. I remember him taking me to a big baseball promotional event at Madison Square Garden in NY City where I won the door prize; a Rawlings baseball mitt. My Dad and I would play catch in the backyard every night when he got home from work. Those were good times.

Soon after the 4^th grade school year started there were tryouts for the Little League teams that were organized to compete during the season for the overall championship at the end of the year. It was arranged such that there were teams named after a major-league baseball team of the time, i.e. Yankees, Dodgers, Cardinals, etc. The boys that made the cut during tryouts would be assigned by the Little League organizers to a team with a major-league name. Following the tryouts, they would send a letter home to the parents that would tell each recipient which team they were assigned to play for.

I enthusiastically tried out the first year I was eligible. My Dad and I showed up at the ballpark and he signed me up. The tryouts lasted two days. The first day was fielding where they would hit balls out to your position, and you had to catch and throw to the infield. I felt I did OK. I wasn’t nearly as good as some of the other kids but most of the time I could catch the ball if it came in my vicinity and I could throw it pretty close to the infield. I didn’t feel over confident, but I felt satisfied with my ability.

The second day was batting. Well I was terrible. I just didn’t have what it took. I tried really hard to do well but I just couldn’t get it done. Most of the time I struck out and only rarely connected with the ball and then it would generally either go out of bounds or dribble down the infield right into the hands of one of the infielders. When I got up to bat, the kids in the infield would start to yell to their teammates; “easy out, easy out”.

Well as the day wore on my Dad became grumpier and grumpier. At first, he tried to advise and encourage me but as time went on, he became visibly more agitated and by the end of the day he would be, if not outright angry, thoroughly disgusted. My Dad was never good at hiding his feelings. That walk home from the ballfield was an awful long walk.

After the tryouts were over, the Little League organizers would caucus and make their decisions on who made the cut and who didn’t and determine the team assignments for those who made it. Letters would then be sent out by mail to the kids that made it. For me, the next several weeks at school were a horrible experience. After about a week the first letters would reach some of the kid’s homes and the next day they would proudly announce to all their school buddies which team they were on. This was not just the main topic but the only topic of conversation among the boys at school for several weeks. “Hey Skip, I got my letter last night, I’m on the NY Yankees”.  What team are you on?”  Of course, my reply was “I didn’t get my letter yet”.

This would continue every day for several weeks until it became painfully obvious that I wasn’t going to get a “letter”; that I didn’t make the cut. I can honestly report, even today more than sixty years later, that still hurts almost as much as it did at the time. Those next several weeks at school were absolutely living hell for me. I didn’t even want to go to school and face the disappointment and embarrassment.

Only many, many years later did it occur to me what the actual problems were; why I wasn’t good enough to make the cut. The first problem was I couldn’t see the damn ball. I wore glasses but they weren’t sufficient to correct my eyesight to 20/20.  I wouldn’t really see the ball until it was right in front of me and then most of the time it was too late to catch it. If I caught it, it was pure luck.

The second problem was I didn’t have very good hand – eye coordination, still don’t. This may or may not be because of poor eyesight but the fact is I don’t have it, so I tend to focus on activities that don’t require good hand – eye coordination. It reminds me of the old joke, “the patient lifts his arm over his head and says, Doc it hurts when I do this”. The doc says, “Then don’t do that”.

The third problem was I was not a good runner, I’m still not. Running to me is and always has been a painful experience. So even if I could have seen the ball coming, I couldn’t run fast enough to catch it. In hindsight, the whole game was rigged against me. But at nine years old I didn’t realize it and in short, the entire experience was a major disappointment. 

Not realizing what the actual problems were and wanting desperately to be accepted by my peers and especially my Dad, I stupidly tried out again the following year with the same dismal result. At least the second time I actually came down with the flu during the tryouts and had a convenient excuse for my abysmal failure.

So, to this day the bottom line is I basically Hate Fucking Baseball. I’m sorry that my Dad didn’t recognize the actual problems and offer some support, but my Dad never was a really sensitive guy. He was always quite critical of whatever whenever.

Sometimes I would complain about it to my Mom and her response was always, “If you think he’s bad you should have seen his Father!” No consolation there. So now in retrospect, many years later, I finally realize why my relationship with my Father wasn’t all that good. Between my disciplinary problems in school and my abysmal failure to perform up to my Father’s expectations in sports our Father-Son relationship slowly deteriorated and unfortunately never fully recovered.

I sure hope they don’t follow that tryout and notification procedure anymore! It would have been a lot better if they would just have told me at the tryouts that I was cut. It would have hurt, but not nearly as much as going to school every day for the next three weeks waiting to hear if I made the team or not with my classmates getting their letters and team assignments and never hearing a thing until it slowly dawned on me that I was cut and wasn’t going to get a letter. It basically soured me on the whole experience. To this day it leaves a bad taste and in fact it was actually very difficult for me to write this more than sixty years later.

Eventually I discovered a few sports where I could participate which didn’t require good eyesight or the ability to run well. No team sports among them; swimming, diving, gymnastics, biking, ice skating, skiing etc. These were a few I eventually got pretty good at, but I still dislike baseball.  Well after all these years guess I don’t actually hate baseball any longer but I’ve no interest at all. It only brings back bad memories and negative vibes. This took place in the fourth and fifth grades and coincided with the first instances where I started to regard school as an extremely negative if not altogether an outright toxic environment.