We were 10 miles out of Simi Valley when the nerves began to take hold.
My child, you see, had made the All-Star Baseball team, and we were on our way to another weekend-long tournament, the sum of which represent the pinnacle of youth baseball season and a sizeable chunk of our weekends, not to mention the bulk of the Marriott Courtyard hotel chain’s annual profit margin.
This particular strain of baseball life carries within it a pleasing current of wholesome summertime nostalgia, as well as a heady intensity rife with the potential for accidental overdose. Trust — you really haven’t lived until you’ve seen a parent, one hand clutching a rapidly congealing boat of cut-rate nachos, the other offering a series of the sort of enthusiastic gestures that might earn a kid detention, tossed from a game for spewing expletives at the ump.
I like to think myself above such nonsense.
And yet. When the kids on the other team are yelling their incessant, earwormy chants about pitches being “up high, up high, up where the birdies fly” and it’s my kid on the mound and those pitches (perfectly armpit-level, I hasten to add) are being called balls, I’m not immune to becoming so overwhelmed by sympathetic stress that I might, oh, I don’t know, fantasize in graphic detail about sacrificing every last shred of my (real or imagined) dignity in favor of telling that ump and those kids exactly where they might put those balls (that were obviously — unless, of course, you have no eyes, you idiot — strikes). Fortunately, my self-control is greater (if only slightly) than my urge to shout until they see the error of their ways, and thus I medicate with other self-destructive behaviors, like drinking Diet Coke and eating sunflower seeds until my lips bleed.
The number of sunflowers that must die so that youth baseball can live is a question I dare not contemplate.
It is rough stuff, as a parent, to watch your child undertake an endeavor so intense. And baseball is uniquely, perversely so. The spotlight is harsh, landing these kids — so young they still have to call time-out so their coach can come onto the field to help them tie their shoelaces — in its glare, all alone in the shadow of that long fly ball, or in the batter’s box, or on the pitcher’s mound. Forget the skills; if nothing else, baseball sure can teach a kid a thing or two about how to survive public failure. Namely, that though it might not be pretty, survive it they will. Soon enough, the moment will be over, and the spotlight will settle upon someone else. (God help them.)
Of course, the flipside is also true. For every blown play, there is a miraculous catch; for every walk, a strikeout; for every strikeout, a home run. This past weekend, my son’s team got crushed twice, crushed another team once, and came back from a crushing deficit to win after a rally during which every single kid got a hit. But no matter the box scores, once the dust had settled and the coaches had dispensed with their postmortems and 97 percent of the 13,000 pieces of gear (including but not limited to the now de rigueur sliding mitts that look like nothing so much as overgrown pot holders) had been collected, the kids’ reactions were always the same: glee, for a trip to the Snack Shack was at hand, and beyond that, a hotel was waiting, with a pool and a mini-store in the lobby and computers in the business center on which they might steal a moment for clandestine Googling of important things, like “Shohei Ohtani,” or “buttcrack.”
And, somehow, we parents would live on, to watch them fight another day.
