RT Staff: This is a essay written by one of our main correspondents in Northern California. His son is graduating this month and just played his last high school baseball game. Even though his son will play competitively this summer and at a major D-I next year, it's still hard for parents to think that a milestone and an era has ended.
It seems like only yesterday that our son waddled out to his position at the age of three dressed in an over sized Yankees Jersey topped with a large billed cap that enveloped his round little head. There he stood, pounding his glove, in the infielders ready position, yelling, "hey batter, hey batter", ready for action, any action. Every two batters, some kid would make contact with the safety ball that lay inconspicuously on the rubber tee and my son took off...Knocking down everybody in his path, picking up the ball and firing it the chest of some unsuspecting recipient that occupied first base. Ooooomph! And, after another first baseman went down, and yet another group of parents scolded us for our sons aggressiveness, we decided that it was time to move him up to the next level...at three!!!
And that's how our sons baseball career started. Really! It's all on video and as his graduation draws closer and closer, those aged videos are being popped into the "old" VHS player with more frequency. He went from tee ball and safety balls to to pitching machine and the yellow dimple balls. After mastering the near perfect waist high pitches that the pitching machines served up, he then graduated to the walk-a-thon experience of player pitch. Even back then, he was selective with his pitches, even if the umpire didn't want him to be. If he got called out on strikes and didn't like the call, he was satisfied. He wasn't going to be cheated out of a good at bat by swinging at bad pitches.
By 9 years old, we had given travel ball a try and traveled across state to sample what that was all about. After just one tournament of getting pounded by much better, more experienced and better coached teams, we were hooked. This is how players get better. Nevertheless, we still participated in Little League and that was fun too. Not being originally from Northern California, we liked the way the local community newspapers embraced the leagues and we started piling up all the press clipping of our sons no hitter in one game and game winning homer the next.
When his Little League season ended on a high note, we immediately segued into travel ball and our clubs annual trek to Cooperstown for its 12 year old teams. I'm not sure if our sons realized the magnitude or appreciated the history of touring Cooperstown, but for me and many of the dads on the team, we could have spent the entire week in the Hall. The tournament too, was everything it's billed to be and since we were participating in the TOC week, the competition was phenomenal. Yes, there was a 12 year old kid throwing 87 miles an hour, another player that hit 8 HR's and yet another that was 6'2" and 210lbs with pork chop sideburns (we struck him out three times on junk).
The years that followed were spent all over the country in tournaments in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Las Vegas, and all over the huge state of California. One National Championship and three 5th place or better finishes later, our son finally made it to high school. Not just any high school, but a high profile school in a high profile league. What an experience. Great facilities, great coaches and a community of fans that followed them as religiously as a pro fan would follow their home town team. He paid his dues and played on the freshman and JV teams through his sophomore year, but when he got the opportunity, he channeled all of those competitive experiences of his travel teams and broke out.
His junior and senior years were everything a proud dad and mom could hope for and as his season came to a regretful end the other night in a hotly contested play-off game, an empty, hollow feeling engulfed us and out came the videos, the scrapbooks and the realization that our boy had grown up. He's already making plans to work out with a strength and conditioning coach to prepare for college ball and getting psyched for his senior trip. He is already planning his life without mom and dad and while that makes us very proud, it also makes us very sad that the the all consuming time we spent with our little boy will soon be reduced to holidays and the 5 hour trips home to catch up on his wash.
I never understood why my mom cried when I went off to college, but I do now and my wife and I wonder if our son will understand our emotion as well. Wow, we will miss him. He has made us so proud and I'm sure he will continue to do so. But it's going to be so hard to not be able to share that success with him every night at dinner anymore. Good thing we have the family cell phone plan, because those first few months will be burning up a lot of minutes. But that too will pass. In the animal kingdom, the mother tries to ween it's young from the dependence on the parents. In this case the parents will need to be weened from its dependence on the activities of its young. Parents...enjoy that time with your son as much as you can now, because it goes by so fast. Good luck seniors and good luck parents!
RT Staff
