My baseball-crazy eight-year-old boy is playing Fall Ball—a pared-down, more instructional, less competitive supplement to the summer leagues that tend to be all about championships and all-star nominations and too-intense parents. In Fall Ball, there are no playoffs and most of the teams don’t bother keeping score. My son’s enjoying it, and so am I. He likes it because he’s getting to pitch and steal bases for the first time. I like it because, as one of the assistant coaches, I don’t come home from games twitching with anxiety from dealing with screaming parents and crying children. I appreciate the laidback vibe.
At my son’s first Fall Ball practice, his coach gave the kids a little speech. He told them to let him know if they wanted to try playing a new position, and not to worry if they messed up. We’re here to learn, he said. Now’s the time to try things because there’s no pressure. And I was wondering: Why don’t we tell kids that in the summer, too? If instructional and pressure-free and noncompetitive is the right philosophy for Fall Ball, why not for summer leagues, too?
Maybe the answer is that kids—even more than pain-in-the-ass parents and crazy coaches—are competitive. Even though we don’t keeps score in our Fall Ball games, just about any kid on our team could tell you the score at any given moment of a game. For that matter, they know the score, and trash-talk freely about it, even when we’re playing a little intrasquad game in practice. I understand the impulse. When I play a game—pickup basketball with the old men, Scrabble with my wife—I want to win. A bad round of Wii golf can depress me for hours. And it's not that I think a little competition is going to kill anyone. So why is there still a part of me that wants to knock down all the scoreboards at the peewee baseball fields?
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I am so grateful to have completely un-athletic children. I couldn't cope with the stress of organized sports; truly, I think my head would explode. I mean, I'm barely hanging on as it is.
ReplyDeleteAnon, I know the feeling. I have come home from some of AJ's practices--12 little kids with bats who don't want to listen to you--blinking like Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther movies.
ReplyDeleteThe other parents at my son's soccer games have learned not to ask me the score. I think it's partly a learned response to playing croquet and cards with my very competitive mother and husband.
ReplyDeleteJeanne, I can only pray that my boy doesn't get it in his head to play soccer, too.
ReplyDeleteI think that most of us (not all) like to compete and most of us (not all) like the pure play of the game. So it's nice to have times when the score is not important, but there is really nothing like a moment when the game is on the line and someone makes a great play. (e.g. Wise's catch in Buehrle's perfect game. On the other side, Buckner's muffed grounder.) I used to play tennis with a guy who was great to hit with but insisted on not keeping score. Much as I love hitting without keeping score sometimes, all the time was too much.
ReplyDeletePaul, you make (no surprise) a really important point, about competition providing the context for the memorable play. Wise's catch, if made while shagging flies during batting practice, doesn't become part of shared baseball memory. It's the scoreboard that makes a play like that matter. Still, I'm going to cling to my ambivalence about keeping score and competition when it comes to the little kids. It's wonderful to see a kid come through in the clutch---and there is no clutch without a scoreboard. But who wants to see an eight-year-old playing the Buckner role?
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