THE UMPIRE struck back. He ripped off his mask, turned to the stands where sat his tormentor, stalked over, breathed heavily several times to collect himself, looked up through the fence and fixed her with a hard countenance that would have made Captain Ahab say, “Boy, that guy is really angry.” Then he spoke, each word as heavy as the aluminum bats splayed out on the ground. “That’s it, lady. That . . . is . . . it. One more word from you, you open your mouth one more time, and I’m throwing you out.”
The woman, no shrinking violet, mockingly met his flashing eye with both of her own, bit back the piquant rejoinder she was no doubt playing pepper with and nodded her sarcastic assent to Inspector Javert, who replaced his mask, hulk-walked his way back to home plate and resumed play.
The good news is, that woman is my wife. The other good news is, she’s the diplomat of the family. The umpire, I don’t know so well. But I expect to see him at another epic contest before the end of the season, that contest, by the way, not being the one on the field between the two crack squads of six-year-olds in their too-big hats, but between himself and The Divine Mrs. M. I don’t envy him. This is a woman who out-drank me on our first date and appeared, at the close of it, perfectly fit to perform an involved surgery. (Which, in a sense, several dates later, she did. Hmm. I either have to take that sentence out or tell my wife I didn’t write a column this week. “Writer’s block, Honey. You know. Heh-heh.” Yes, I think that’s the way to go.)
Now, why do I call that good news? Why does my heart swell with pride at my wife’s making a volunteer official angry enough to spit? After all, look at the poor guy: a gangly adolescent who, even in the open air, made the diamond smell like Clearasil; an otherwise good kid who chose this noble, unpaid work over spending time driving next to me with his radio blasting. Of course, I’m thrilled that he and others like him are giving their time in something wholesome. Truth to tell, he wasn’t even the bad guy. He was between my wife and the bad guy. The bad guy was using him as a shield (Sound familiar?). That makes him innocent, you say? Tough noogies for both of them, I say. Let me tell you the story.
At the risk of overstating the obvious, the whole point of six-year-olds playing organized T-ball is to learn how to: hit the ball; field the ball; throw the ball; pump their arms while running; stop crying; etc. They don’t keep score, because there’s no reason to keep score, because who cares? Any parent who does care should be slapped for a half hour and ordered to see a stadium full of therapists. The coaches who give their time to these leagues are, without compare, the finest American men I have ever met. They smile warmly, they guide, they teach, they have endless patience, they treat all the kids equally (even when their own kids are playing), and, from my first moment of contact with these fine men, it disturbed me greatly to realize that I am not one of them.
To explain, let me go back to last year, our first season, our first experience. Yes, even at that very first practice, I saw that I had no affection for anyone’s kid but my own. And if one of the other puppy-legged outfielders wandered in front of my son’s position, I was prone to imagine the infringer’s head exploding like a melon. At one point my wife approached me at the fence in the middle of this reverie. The way she blanched when I turned told me my kisser had a fierceness that would have made Mohamed Atta look like Charles Nelson Reilly, and my fingers were laced through the metal tines so tightly one might have imagined eighteenth century Redcoats approaching to peel me away for the gibbet. “You’re not having fun, are you?” I didn’t answer. What was there to say? “If you’re not having fun, why do you come?” Again, there was no good answer. “Why don’t you just take the baby home and pick us up later at Burger King? The coach and the rest of the sane parents are all going out afterwards.” I finally spoke. “Do they have bars these days in Burger Kings?” Now it was her turn not to speak. She sighed and turned, but I stopped her with triumphant clarity. “It’s that Tyler, you know, that little son-of-a-” “Taylor,” she said. “Whatever. He doesn’t concentrate. And he keeps leaving his position. You’re not supposed to leave your position.” She briefly considered the penalty in California for justifiable homicide and then bade me adieu. It is enough to report that I was home shortly thereafter, and without the baby: She didn’t think it was prudent for him to drive with me.
The discerning readers among you, and you know who you are, will have noticed that I’m almost telling two different tales. “Hey, your wife made a teenage umpire mad. You mean, she’s a lunatic parent? Or is she the sane one who stops you from being the lunatic parent?” Neither. No matter what my dark eccentricities, I would never betray them to the general public (except, of course, through these columns and every part I’ve had for twenty years, but never mind that now). I mean that I clap for every kid on the team and urge them forward. I adore the coaches and leave them to their methods, and I never say a word. And I shrug and commiserate and grin with all the parents, including the two mommies of one kid, which, believe me, is by far the best acting I’ve ever done.
My wife and I both have the clearly correct perspective on organized little league, and if you have this outlook, it can be a very simple, ordered, weekend day: The kids are gorgeous in their uniforms, and they wear their immense batting helmets like cuter versions of Mike Dukakis standing up in that absurd tank ride; they learn how to play; they learn sportsmanship; they get pizza and candy; the parents take them home and put them to bed; Daddy makes his big Saturday night move on Mommy; Daddy gets shot down like an Iraqi general expressing reservations around a conference table; Daddy gets quietly hammered and reads nineteenth century Russians; Hey, what happened to this sentence?; Is it fixable?; Oh, forget it; Let’s just move on.
So why was Mrs. M. on the ump enough to make him snap, you ask? Because on this particular day, there was a lunatic parent. It was the opposing coach. And he was behaving badly, and he had coached his players to behave badly, and it just wasn’t fair, and a couple of our kids actually got hurt, and no one on our side, including our good and decent coaches was standing up and pointing it out. And my wonderful wife, correctly reasoning that God hates a coward, took it on herself to rise, hold the scales of justice aloft and fling them into the official’s face, so to speak.
And where was I? You haven’t been listening. I had obeyed the Sarge’s earlier standing orders from the first season, and was nowhere near Spotsylvania Courthouse. I heard about this contretemps after she got home. In fact, at the time it happened, I was out on our balcony, comfortably smoking and spending my two found hours alternating between journals of opinion like this one and fantasizing about every woman I’ve ever even glanced at for the last thirty years. (Aw, what the heck, she’s not going to be reading this one anyway, remember?)
Everyone knew about this coach from basketball over the winter. He will do anything to win, literally anything, which is immoral and unethical at any time in life, but is also perfectly pointless when the players are young enough to be looking forward to watching “Blue’s Clues” later. All the good coaches play all their players and rotate their positions every inning to give everyone a chance to feel his way around the field. There’s plenty of time to learn competitiveness and merit in a few years, sometime after they learn to tie their own laces. All the good coaches insist that their players throw the ball after they get it, because this teaches them how to throw, which is a very good thing. Now, for a variety of reasons, the player they throw it to is never going to catch it, and no opposing players ever get thrown out. But that’s fine, because, again, remember, WHO CARES? THEY’RE ALL JUST LEARNING, AND THAT’S THE BLANKING POINT. Well, this coach, the bad coach, doesn’t rotate the kids and plays only the “good” players (whatever that means at six), especially his son, whom he plants on the pitcher’s mound like a Spartan at Thermopoly. He then instructs–no, orders–his players never to throw the ball, but, rather, to pick it up, chase down the runner and tag him out. This is not hard for them to do, since the batters, if they even remember to run at all, either forget to drop the bat and have to go back to home plate to do so, or, if they actually head down the baseline (usually skipping), frequently stop completely to look for the ice cream truck.
The net effect is that his players never learn how to throw, and our players never learn how to be on base. But there’s more. This suburban Heydrich has taught his kids not just to run the opposing players down and tag them out, but to swing the ball down onto their enemies with just slightly more ferocity than Chingachgook arcing his ball-peen tomahawk onto the pate of a sluggish Huron. When they connect, which is often, it hurts, and the kids cry. So might you and I, if only from the choking, stammering wrongness of it.
It was when this happened for the fifth time (not to our son, by the way) that my wife stood up in the bleachers, glared at the viciously twisted coach and screamed at the umpire to do his RELATIVELY HARMLESS ADJECTIVE job, and to tell that ONE HARMLESS AND ONE PUNGENT ADJECTIVE coach to quit it.
The rest you know. Censured. Shunned. Sent out of the fort with a broken sword and torn epaulets like Chuck Connors in “Branded.” I couldn’t have been more proud.
My wife tells me our team is going to be playing that team again. I think I’ll go to this one. I think I’ll wait for something to happen and stroll around to the other side. I’ll think I’ll say something to the parents in the other bleachers. I think I’ll say something to the coach. Maybe two somethings. I think I’ll say something to the seventeen-year-old umpire, and then eject myself. And then I think I’ll treat our team to as much junk as they can hold. Maybe something for the parents, too. Are you sure they don’t have bars yet at these Burger Kings?
You know what? Maybe I’ll tell my brave wife about this column after all.
Larry Miller is a contributing humorist to The Daily Standard and a writer, actor, and comedian living in Los Angeles.
