And We're Off

It's baseball season again. Besides coaching together, P. and I have been named league representatives, a sure sign of the coming Apocalypse. In that hallowed role we are responsible for paperwork and getting yelled at by angry parents.

The draft was held the other night. P. and I were nominally in charge, our primary goal to ensure some semblance of actual and perceived fairness. We spent hours, days actually, reading player evaluations, revising spreadsheets, gaming possible outcomes. In the end, the draft went pretty well; no outbursts, no accusations of cheating. So far.

P. and I did our best, even though our position as league reps left us drawing last for draft order. Besides our own we were able to get a few of the players from last year's team.

Two of them are brothers, the children of friends we made last year when their oldest played for us. When I coached him in soccer this fall I told him not to kick the ball too hard if he had leprosy, what with potential limb loss and all. He ignored me. Smart kid.

Another was on our brief extended season team a couple years ago, a sweet child who got his first hit after P. spent most of a weekend afternoon working with him. Someone told us his mother's been talking about how happy she was we'd picked him up. We're happy too.

The last is is a quiet boy who played for us last year, a little shy. He's a good catcher and a decent hitter and we both think he's likely to blossom this year. When he walked into the workout room Sunday for our first team practice and saw some buddies from last year he grinned and settled in like he belonged. He does.

We have new kids too. Some younger ones, the age my kid was last year. They look at P.'s son and mine as veterans, and I suppose they are. P. worked with them on pitching and fielding and I took them into the batting cage. They all caught, they all threw, they all hit. It wasn't all pretty, but it was something we could work into a team.

At the end of the practice, we gathered the kids and told them how well they'd done and gathered the parents and had the first of any number of conversations about priorities, which for us include having some fun and learning some things and making some friends and not much else. We got a couple skeptical looks but we can live with that.

It's baseball season.