My new-home improvement odyssey continues to tie me to the mast, but I'm grateful to have readers like Walter Guest, who kindly submitted this reminiscence of his brief Little League coaching days to help keep Lefty's lights on. Thanks, Walter. It brought back my less-than-fond memories of being a 14-year-old umpire in the local Police Athletic League. All umps worked solo and had to call balls and strikes from behind the mound. The verbal abuse from the parents in the stands was unbelievable.
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Managing in Little League? My advice is: Don't do it!
That might be some of the best advice you get in your life. It was dumb of me to do that. I had no people skills to start with and I had spent so much time overseas it was hard for me to relate to American families. Anyway, here's what happened:
When my kid turned 8 he was anxious to get into Little League. Anything to blend in, to be one of the group. I had brought him home from Vietnam when he was 4. So at 8 I signed him up for Little League. On the sign-up form they ask you to volunteer for something. Strictly out of guilt, it didn't seem fair to ask everyone else to do the work, I checked "Coach." It turned out no one else checked anything so I got appointed Manager. There was no player draft. They just gave me 12 kids at random, like you deal a deck of cards, except for my kid of course who had to be on my team..
At our first practice almost all the parents turned out. Many helped chase balls and hit flies and pick up fallen kids and such. At the end of the first practice they had all given up on the team. It was doomed. They wished me a smirking good luck. I hardly ever saw any of them again. Not one parent helped with or even watched another practice.
I didn't know why they wrote off the team. Three of the kids were really good, three were pretty bad, and the other 6 were so-so. (My kid was in the middle.) To me, it had the makings of a pretty good team. Most teams would be glad to have that level of talent.
But the effort required of me, both physical and mental, was enormous. As usual when getting into a project, I threw myself into it with complete psycho-tinged abandon. Which meant abandoning regular work and most everything else for the three weeks of our pre-season training.
During our pre-season, in addition to our regular practice, I emphasized two things. During our infield practice, after a ground ball was fielded and thrown to first, I called out a random base to throw to, and then another, and then another. It was like working with an empty slate.. They did it without thinking. The kids got very good at that. It turned out to be a devastating weapon when playing against wild-running 8-year-olds.
The second thing I emphasized was extra batting practice for our 3 weakest players. Some days the practice would be for them alone. I did not want an automatic out in our lineup.
When we came to our first game, I didn't know what to expect. We hadn't played any practice games. I just hoped it wouldn't be an embarrassment for us. All the parents showed up, most likely expecting the worst.
What surprised me most was the intensity of our players. In the top of the first inning we scored 15 runs. The opposing team came off the field in tears. My job then was to keep our team from losing its concentration. It's hard to keep an 8-year-old focused when his team is leading by a couple of dozen runs. It didn't help that our parents had started rooting for the demoralized, tearful opposition. We won that first game 31-7. It would have been more but my guys let up.
Then the criticisms began, in a pseudo-friendly way. "Why do you call all the boys by their last names?" "They all have first names, you know." "They are just little boys." "Do you know their first names?"
I ignored those remarks. I called all the kids, even mine, by their last names because I knew it would make them feel older, more mature. I didn't want them to feel like little boys. I made it a point not to get friendly with any of them. I was the boss and I ordered them around and they did what I told them. That was our relationship.
But it had started. The parents, who had walked out on the team, had seen success and now wanted back in. At our next game they brought a huge dispenser of iced orange Gatorade and hung it in our dugout. Have you ever tried to keep a dozen 8-year-olds focused when there was unlimited orange drink around? The kids were constantly lined up for a drink. It was a severe distraction. Despite that we won the game easily. Drinks were banned from the dugout.
Then they complained that my kid was playing second base when better players were in the outfield. That was true but I didn't respond. That is the manager's prerogative. Little did they know, I would gladly have stepped aside to let anyone else manage so they could then play their kid wherever the frack they wanted.
Then came the killer complaint. I HAD SWORN IN FRONT OF THE KIDS! This was my golden opportunity. I couldn't remember having sworn, but I immediately resigned as manager. Unfortunately they launched an investigation and found I had once said "shit" when a ball hit me in the shin. They came to the conclusion that this was not only pardonable, but understandable. They talked me into coming back.
I carefully kept the batting averages of all the kids. After a few more lopsided wins, I noticed that our poorest hitter was hitting better than Stan Musial did in his career. Not by much, .333 to .331, but it was enough to make me proud. I printed out the averages of all the kids, including Stan Musial at the bottom, and passed the list to all the parents.
I don't think any of them had any idea what it meant. They looked at them as if they were test grades from school. One hysterical mother phoned me to tell me her kid had been crying all day because of where he placed on the list. (This kid was hitting over .500! There were no errors in that league. Getting on base by batted ball was a hit.)
My team parents went to league headquarters and got a rule passed that no batting average would EVER be printed, mentioned, or referred to in any way. That was the perfect time for me to resign. I was replaced by another parent who immediately made his incompetent kid the shortstop. The team went on to lose two games after that during the rest of the season. I don't think they would have lost any had I remained in charge. But I don't take a lot of pride in that because I had been handed, in the luck of the draw, three stars and six decent players at the beginning of the season. That would be a good team at any level of baseball.
What I did take tremendous pride in was bringing our three lousy players to the point where they helped the team considerably. To see those three nerdy little guys accepted and sometimes celebrated by their teammates made me more happy than I can express.
