since we have so many people involved in little league, I thought this would be a good catch all spot for stories this year.

I was coaching young coach pitch/t ballers yesterday. One coach handled pitching. I handled getting players ready to bat and bench management which is complete chaos. 10 parents were hanging out behind the bench without any offer to help. Anyway, I was doing a pretty good job. One problem is that not every kid brings his own helmet (which was standard when I was a kid but now everyone seems to need personal equipment). The obsessive/compulsive kids, of course, cannot handle sharing a helmet with anyone so it is a scramble when everyone bats in an inning. Some woman, in the middle of an inning as I am in a flurry of activity, decides to walk up to me and tell me that sharing helmets is how lice starts. I stared through her for about 15 seconds then said, "thanks, doctor" and went back to doing my work. She walked away.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Have you been served with the lawsuit papers yet?

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We shared helmets all the time in little league and high school!

Tell the kid to wear a hat, then put his helmet on. Problem solved.

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Tell the mother to Philip Drummond that shit and buy helmets for every kid on the team

Growing up in Joliet was quiet the experience for me and my peers, especially those of us who decided to play Pony baseball at St. Joseph's Park near Crest Hill. While a well-run league with a ton of talented players (for the area), the politics behind the scenes seemed to overshadow most of the enjoyment kids could have playing baseball and developing into potential high school recruits for schools like JCA, Providence, Mt. Carmel, Lockport, and Lincoln-Way.

Simply put, if Dad knew the AD, you were going to get "noticed" a bit more by school scouts.

I was a pretty decent pitcher during my Bronco and Pony-league years and quickly grew to actually love the game. I was also beginning to receive some notority around the league as one of the better pitchers, but none of it mattered since everyone knew I was going to Providence in a couple years and couldn't really compete with the talent in areas like New Lenox, Homer Glen, and Orland Park. Looking back on my experience, I now realize it was a piss-poor excuse to not try my hardest. I regret that a bit.

I'll always remember pitching in a league playoff game against the top-seeded team in our braket. Since I had pitched a couple days prior and our league had some weird "innings-per-week" rule, I was brought into the game in the final inning as the closer. We were holding on to a one-run lead and our opponent's top hitter was due up. I remember he was hitting something ridiculous like .700 for the season with a ridiculous amount of home runs (many of which would fly over Theodore St. and onto the roof of a nearby laundromat).

He was a lefty and stood probably 6'0" at the time, which was huge compared to most kids our age. If I remember correctly he would end up playing at JCA during high school and won a couple area batting titles.

Striking him out with three pitches to record the save was something I'll never forget.

He went on to play ball, and I went on to be more concerned with playing video games and getting blowjobs in the New Lenox K-Mart parking lot from pom-pon players. Funny how things work out.

i hear you dolphin. everyone has their own helmets and bats, shit is laying all over the place. fucking gatorade bottles all over too, what happened to having one cooler with water in it? water isnt good enough anymore.

i saw the most remarkable (lucky) play i have ever seen in my 7 years coaching tee-ball this past weekend. i was coaching 1st base, and one of our kids hit a weak grounder in towards third base. the first baseman on the other team is terrible, he cant catch at all and has dropped several balls already in the inning. the pitcher realizes this, and takes matters into his own hands. he runs towards first so that HE can cover the bag and get the throw. meanwhile, the third baseman gets the ball, sees the inept first baseman standing there, and he just fires the ball towards first - he has a good arm, too. the ball zooms towards first, towards the pitcher who has his back to it, and he has no idea the ball is even coming yet. the ball threads the needle, goes right between the pitchers left arm and his body as he is running, right under his armpit, and hits him smack in the webbing of the glove on his left hand as he reaches first and steps on it for the out. the kid looks down and sees the ball in his glove, and he is thinking "how the fuck did THAT get there?". he never even looked at third base, he just ran to first and the ball magically arrived in his glove at the exact right moment in the exact right place. classic.

I bet that third sacker can ride a hellava bike too.

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Everyone knows baseball is an up and down sport, and it becomes a mental challenge to fight through slumps. I see this with my 10 year old son who is a gifted player. He is on two teams, the in house league and travel. He is dominant on the in house team, but easily loses confidence on the travel team, especially at the plate. In any case, he hit a rough patch two weekends ago as the travel team struggled in a tournament to score runs. It became infectious as our good hitters just could not sustain any type of rally. By the end of a long weekend of 5 games, I could tell my son was shot mentally. We took a day off, and then worked on his basic pitching and hitting skills. In his next in house game, which was last Saturday he was the starting pitcher. They allow 75 pitches max, which makes it tough to get through innings if you walk players. I told my son that I wanted to see him attack the zone and get through 4 innings. Here is how it went down:

He faced 19 batters and made 16 outs. He walked two kids on a 3-2 pitch (he normally walks about 4 or 5). Only one ball was put in play, a slow roller to the 2nd baseman, who booted it badly. No other kid, not on any swing, even foul tipped a ball. He struck out 16 kids. He hit the pitch limit, and the relief pitcher made the final two outs for a 5-0 no-hit win. My son recorded all his outs by strike-out. I was very proud. He also knocked the crap out of the ball. I don't know how God blessed me with a 120 lb. left handed 10 year old, but I thank my lucky stars every day. I love baseball, and it brings me great joy to watch a kid love the game and be successful.

Thanks for reading.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

getting close to that time of the year, frank. are you mentally prepared to deal with the daily recap thread?

Give your son a hearty congrats! He threw a better game than Kerry Wood did against the Astros in 1998!!

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Thanks, it was fun to watch. He is back on the hill Thursday, and I can't wait. Normally he gets about 10 K's, but he always hits that pitch limit.....

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Hawaii (fuck) You

We had our first 9-10 yr old softball game last night. It was quite the crazy ordeal. Our schedule said we played at 6pm, so we arrived about 5:40 to find out that the place we were playing had us listed as playing at 7:30pm. The guy in charge at the park said they were getting all the players from the other team there asap and we would start shortly and we should go ahead and put our stuff in the dugout and start warming up. So we did that. After an hour of waiting and being told they were on the way, we are told that the other team will not be there until 7:30 and we are in the wrong dugout on the wrong field and we will need to move. Needless to say I am not very happy at this point because in the meantime I had called the league director and asked her to check the master schedule to see who was in the wrong. Our game was supposed to be at 6pm and was supposed to be on the field we were already set up at. But the guy insisted we needed to move and wait.

So we finally get all moved and set up on the other field. Then when the game begins the other team starts playing the game with a 10 inch super light softball. I told him the rules say we play with a regular 11 inch softball, that the ball he had was for the 8 and under group for a coach-pitch game. He tells me 9/10 yr old girls will get hurt with the regular ball. Finally after showing him in the rule book and double checking with our league director we got started with the right ball.

At the end of the 4th inning we were winning 14-2 which should have been game over according to the mercy rule for our league-- up 15 after 3 or 10 after 4. I told the umpire and he and the other coach said we were going to go ahead and play the 5th inning. In the top of the 5th inning all our girls decided to hit like Matt Kemp and we score 12 runs and with only 1 out and the score standing at 26-2, the umpire stops the game and says our inning is now over as we have scored too many runs and we are going to the bottom of the 5th for the home team to get their final at bat. At this point all I could do was laugh. Here I wanted to end the thing at 14-2 and go home, but they insisted we play the last inning and now they are irritated because we are scoring too many runs. Game finally ends at 26-3 and we head home. Gotta love it...

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

i had a coach ask me about my daughter joining his travel fastpitch softball team he leads while at the same time continuing with our coach-pitch/t-ball team. she is a pretty good ball player for an 8-year-old, she can throw and catch as well as anyone on the team and is fast, so we went to a softball practice for the hell of it to see if she would like it. she is out on the field, and he hands me the schedule (all road games all over northern illinois and eastern iowa for the next two months) and explains the cost ($300 just to get on the team), and that was the end of that. our town has gone travel team crazy, nobody is happy just playing in the town baseball or softball leagues anymore.

RFDC, our 11-12 year softball game was pretty much the same thing last night. We were up 20-1 after three, and it was "only" 20 because the coach purposely made 3 outs by having our base runners leave the bag early to get a dead ball call out. It can get ugly when the other team has a poor pitcher and the fielders boot everything.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Yeah it has gotten out of hand in our area as well, and travel all over the midwest. That is crazy.

My girls play on some travel teams, but we only travel around our area and the farthest we go is about an hour away.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

The funny thing about all this travel crap is that it amounts to nothing. A good or athletic player is probably going to make a high school team anyway. No one is going to play any significant college baseball and less than no one will play in the pros. Money and time well spent by maladjusted parents.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Its crazy how so many teams are on the "wrong field" and in the "wrong dugout." Part of it is stupid people, part of it is stupid scheduling though.

All they have to do is fucking label them; Field A, B, C, D, or blue field, green field whatever. And forget "home" and "away" dugout. Even MLB has bucked tradition and has some home teams on the 1st base dugout. Just call it dugout 1 and 2 and be done with it.

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I think we had four helmets that we all shared. If you were a lefty, you were SOL.

As far as sharing snacks, the moms took turns bringing a cooler full of soda or juice boxes.

If we won the game, our coach took us to King Kone in Wheaton for ice cream.

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Good people drink good beer - Hunter S. Thompson

<º)))><

Waiting for the time when I can finally say
That this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way

Yeah it is stupid and people just make big deals out of nothing. Like in our situation, the complex we were at had 2 fields next to each other for girls softball. There were no games going on at 6 on either field. And they had scheduled games on both at 7:30pm. So the other 2 teams start showing up for their game and instead of putting them on the field where no one is at, they insist on putting them on the field where we are already set up and in the dug out. Just stupid. Put them on the field where no one is at right now and get them started instead of putting everyone out and making everyone move around.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

this was the exact point i was making to a group of coaches over at the fields this weekend. if your kid works hard and loves playing ball, and plays with his buddies a lot in their spare time, and goes to the cages regularly and plays in the community little league, when all is said and done he is going to meet up with all the travel league kids when they are freshmen in high school, so what is the point? Sure, there are some outstandingly talented kids in the travel leagues who are looking for more challenge, but for a regular kid, i would rather play all the time in a community league than sit on the bench on a 12-13 strong travel team. sure, it is exciting making a travel team, but what is the real benefit unless your kid is a truly special talent?

if they dissolved the splinter travel teams and organized everything back into a central community league, got all the talent back under one umbrella, everyone would benefit. then you could certainly have an additional travel team at each level for tournaments for the kids and parents who want to go for that.

Fair points, but I would counter with this. Your kid will probably improve his play more on a travel team for several reasons:

-The coaching is much better than a typical in house team.
-More balls will get put in play.
-The other kids can actually make the throws/catches.
-Playing against tougher competition improves your own game.
-The kids are playing a lot more baseball and practicing more.

I didn't want to do travel, but I couldn't take another year of just doing in house. We would only get through the batting order twice in a game, and my son ended up getting 4 at bats a week. The kids around him are so bad that very few plays were made in the field, and the pitchers generally just walked him. Now he is going to play about 50 games this year, and he is getting lots of practice. Of course we love baseball, so we enjoy all the extra running around. I know it's not for everyone.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

In the midst of all the frustration from our game last night came a perfect example of why I enjoy coaching and helping out these kids. We have a little girl on our team that when she came to our first practice did not have a glove and had never played any sport. In the first 2 practices she got hit in the face three times playing catch, and I was sure she was going to quit. But she kept at it. Last night she came up to bat for the first time with the bases loaded and she swung as hard as she could at one of the pitches and hit a little dribbler out by the pitcher. The team proceeded to throw the ball all around the infield which allowed all 3 runs on base to score. As she stood on first base and began to realize that her hit helped get 3 girls into score she had the biggest smile on her face and said, "I DID THAT????" It was a great moment, and I am very proud of her. Her mom just texted me and told me how much that meant to her and how she has not stopped talking about it. That kind of stuff makes all the other frustrations completely worth it.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

But then did you tell her that technically it was an 0fer since the play should have been made? Let's see what kind of smile she has when she sees her batting avg is still a big, fat zero!

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oh Frank...

I cannot wait for the tales of you and your future wife training up a future White Sox meatball

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Thats awesome.

My daughter had a similiar look on her face when I told her the ball she hit went over the LF head

"I didnt know it went over his head" she said thru the beaming smile

Well one thing is for sure, if s/he is getting hit in the face 3 or 4 times just by playing catch, I won't be signing them up for a league

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The best I ever saw at hitting the ball over the LF head? RPB's daughter.

Rack her!

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

you obviously haven't been around many young kids playing catch.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

If they are 9-10 years old, they should be able to play catch. I'm not saying they won't drop balls, but if I have a kid and they are still getting hit in the face repeatedly just by playing catch at 20', s/he won't be in a league without a lot more practice.

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We got a kid with a broken arm. He hits really well with one arm and is always down for the high five with the broken arm

He is, without question, the best one armed T ball player Ive seen in my 4 weeks in this game