A New Adventure: Coaching Little League
On baseball, America, and Alexis de Tocqueville
If you had asked me a few years ago, when I was finishing up my PhD in History at Cambridge to list all the ways I might possibly be spending my spring evenings, coaching little league in central Pennsylvania would not figure anywhere even close to the top of the list.
An American Pastime
I stopped playing baseball after three years, and that was during the Clinton administration. And in the first term of the Clinton administration.
My playing days over, my interest as a spectator then took a nosedive after the MLB strike of 1994. It turned out that it wasn’t just a sport but a business, and money played a bigger part in it than I could really wrap my head around.
Why would you cancel the World Series?
In the late 1990s, baseball as a whole enjoyed a resurgence because of the record-breaking (and, as it turned out later, steroid-fueled) exploits of Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa. But I didn’t really return to baseball in any way at all until the early 2000s.
By then, I was living in Washington state and our local team had acquired a Japanese player who seemingly always found a way to get a hit and could throw runners out at third base all the way from right field. For a few years, my friends and I would buy tickets exclusively in right field just to get a chance to watch Ichiro Suzuki paw the sod and throw runners out hundreds of feet away.
Of course, I went off to college and moved on to other things. Then, when I left the country at the beginning of the Obama administration, baseball became almost impossible to follow. You might be able to stay up really late one Sunday in Europe to watch the Super Bowl, but only the most rabid fans can stay up late to watch the entire World Series, yet alone any significant part of the 162-game regular season.
A few years ago, when I moved back to the States, I was unhappy. As regular readers know, there are a large number of things I prefer in Europe. I’m not sure how conscious the desire was, but at a very deep level, I needed to connect with something in America that made me feel ok that I was here. Something that escaped the hyper-partisanship of our politics and hectic pace of our communal life.
Fortuitously, the Phillies made the World Series in 2022, and it was all too easy to jump on the bandwagon. My wife and I were both living in Philly the last time the Phillies won the World Series a decade and a half earlier. More than one of my students at Penn had skipped my class to go out to the victory parade, try to climb greased poles, and get wasted in the middle of the day.
I bought all three of my kids Phillies hats, but that wasn’t enough. The Phillies lost.
However, it turned out to be just enough to hook me back on baseball again.
In the evenings, I find that I am too exhausted to read too much (I get all my good reading done in the early hours of the morning). And there are precious few series on Netflix that interest me these days. So when our house finally finds a state of tranquility after the kids’ bedtime, I now fill that calm with baseball.
For someone like me, socialized into the trappings of academia, it is an unusual pasttime and an unexpected joy. But in some small way, it helps to reconcile me with being American far from our urban centers.
Becoming a Coach
All three of our kids have taken an interest in baseball since we returned to the United States. For them, it is not Ichiro, but another Japanese player—Shohei Ohtani—who hooked them.
When I explained to my oldest that he was doing things that no one had done since Babe Ruth a century ago, she somehow became enraptured. Every morning, she asked to see highlights. A couple years ago, I ended up taking both of the oldest kids to an Angels game in Philadelphia, more to see Ohtani than the Phillies.
But it is my son whose interest has been the most sustained. After three years of playing whiffle ball and catch in the backyard, I finally signed him up to play.
For those who are unfamiliar, rec sports leagues work entirely on parent volunteer hours. I think it’s one of the few areas of civic engagement left where that volunteer work is so robust.
Growing up, I remember going to pancake breakfasts sponsored by the Rotary or the Lions Club. A good chunk of the kids I knew were in Scouts. But so much of that has gone by the wayside. Volunteer fire departments struggle to recruit enough people to operate. My parents’ generation didn’t fill out the civic sphere the way my grandparents did. You just see people outside a lot less now, whether for volunteering or just for commerce. You can order everything to be delivered at home, and there are so many shiny rectangles to keep us all—adults and kids—entertained at home.
Kids sports still remains rather robust in the kind of civic engagement it can turn out. For all kinds of reasons, parents want their kids to play. And they’ll put in the money and the time…and the volunteer hours.
When we signed my son up, I didn’t really want to run concessions. And there was a shortage of head coaches in my son’s league. So, against my better judgment, I decided I would volunteer to be a head coach.
Too often, people of my class don’t bother to volunteer. We are too busy with our intellectual work and if we do volunteer, it usually is for a political or social cause. I may be the only dad in America who volunteered to coach baseball thinking of Tocqueville’s praise of voluntary associations. But what can I say? I did.
At the coaches meeting to begin the season, I looked around the room, wondering if the other dads thought I belonged there. One from his branded polo, I gathered worked at the local golf course. Another wore work boots and drove a pickup truck. I wondered if either had gone to college. I think the head of the league is a lawyer who went to school around here.
None of them would even know how to process my life trajectory. The idea that I have spent most of my adult life working in Europe (in a language other than English) or that I spent half a decade of my life writing a 300-word treatise on a newspaper or that my children were born in Paris and Cambridge…are all so foreign that they wouldn’t even know how to start asking questions about my life, if it even came up.
Around here, I basically never talk about my career, my interests, or my time abroad. And all the more when surrounded by other baseball coaches.
Our First Game
Yesterday evening was the first game in our local Little League season. I was impressed by the boys.
Based on our experience in practice, I expected a lot of errant throws and confusion about base running. They actually managed the basics relatively well. There were a lot of strikeouts, but one of the players who struggled with even the rudiments of swinging just a few weeks ago managed a hit. An infield hit but a hit all the same.
Our infielders—my son included, in his very first baseball game ever—threw a few of their batters out at first base. My son even managed an infield hit. Not bad for a kid who had only hit with a whiffle ball and bat until a few weeks ago.
Of course, the game got off to an inauspicious start. The first batter of the game for the other team hit an inside-the-park home run. Our left fielder was still tracking the ball down by the time the runner crossed home plate. In the fourth inning, though, we strung together four hits and got two runners home to take a 2-1 lead.
Before the fifth inning, we coaches decided it would be the last, given that it was about to get dark. We didn’t manage any extra runs in our half of the inning. And then it came to the other team—I think they called themselves The Fireballs. We got two quick outs. The next batter hit a slow ground ball. Our pitcher picked it up and threw it to first. Everyone but the other team’s coach thought he was out.
But, of course, in this level of Little League, there are no official umpires. Only the coaches.
And I had a decision in that moment. I could have gone over and argued with the other team’s coach or I could have accepted it. And I decided it was better to suffer a small injustice rather than to make a scene. A few batters later, two runs had crossed the plate, and the Fireballs won 3-2.
The boys were crestfallen.
Life Lessons
The boys struggle to follow all the intricacies of the game or even to keep score. So I had to explain to the boys that we had lost. I told myself that it builds character, and it’s important for them to learn to lose, even unjustly. But I wonder if I even believe that myself.
My wife remarked the other team had been taunting ours at different points during the game. I had missed a lot of the chatter while I was running around trying to keep everyone focused.
Later that evening, in the GameChanger app (iykyk), one of the dads piped up in the team chat:
We appreciate the coaches teaching our team to hold their head up high & learn sportsmanship skills. Other teams should follow suit.
A tad bit passive aggressive. But not far from the mark, as far as I am concerned.
I’m going to have to deal with those coaches every week for the next couple months. Starting off politely matters. It’s not a fun lesson for anyone to learn, but it is a natural one for any American in one of Tocqueville’s voluntary associations. There are certain steps you take to belong, and that is one of them.
A little later, the other team’s coach sent me their scoring of the game to validate before sending on to the league. I didn’t raise a word about the bad call at first base. I just confirmed their scoring of the game and ended by telling him, “Good game.”
Go Phillies!!!