My friend John is my everyday-life hero of this summer, but the real star in his tale is Little League Baseball, as a stand-in for all those local, community-based endeavors that are prototypical exemplars of American life.
And, to give away the ending, yes, consider this a paean to Edmund Burke’s idea (amplified by Alexis de Tocqueville) of the importance of the “little platoons” of private and nonpolitical civic life.
But that’s getting ahead of myself. Here’s John’s tale, one that will thrill aficionados of baseball as it was played before the pro game became nothing but strikeouts and homers.
John is a dad who volunteers as a Little League coach (12- and 13-year-olds) on the Eastern Seaboard. His team didn’t feature the biggest, strongest players, but it had some real gamers. John figured that if his guys couldn’t regularly bash the long ball, they should find other ways to compete. They spent lots of time, then, practicing bunting and other lost tools of the trade.
John made darn sure everybody on the team, even the less talented kids, got to play. But still, they won games. Indeed, they reached the local championship and found themselves tied in the bottom of the last inning with two out and John’s son, a speedster, on second base. The batter was having a rough day, with three strikeouts already. The pitcher was a tough lefty — but with a slow delivery to the plate. So John called timeout, pulled aside both batter and runner, and called two plays at once.
On the next pitch, John’s son stole third base. Then on the next, the batter squared away to bunt.
Through the years, John had called a number of “suicide squeeze” bunts. Sometimes they worked. But there were two outs this time. A squeeze play is useless if fielders can just throw out the batter at first for out three. This time, the apparent bunt was just a fake. With the pitcher’s back to John’s son at third, and the pitcher distracted by the hitter squaring away, his son took off, momentarily unnoticed, for home. The pitcher threw the ball. The batter pulled his bat back. The catcher, flummoxed, couldn’t get the tag down.
A league championship, won on a steal of home!
If you understand baseball, you understand how amazing this is. One may as well find the Holy Grail inside the leprechaun’s pot of gold at rainbow’s end.
Wait: It gets better. John also coached his league’s all-star team that played in the regional tournament against the all-stars of surrounding communities. In a double-elimination tourney, his team reached the semifinals against the community whose squad, drawing from a much bigger pool of players, had dominated for years. Yet, sure enough, John’s crew entered the bottom of the last inning in another tie — this time with two outs and nobody on base. The leadoff hitter, smallish but lightning fast, was at bat. The infield was back. The hitter laid down a drag bunt and beat it out for a single.
Then he stole second base, easily beating the throw. Then, in a closer call, he stole third! And then the next batter, also the starting pitcher who had thrown a great game for John’s team, rapped a clean hit between short and third for the game-winning RBI. It was another miraculously manufactured run, and it put them one win away from the state championship tournament.
Alas, there the magic finally ended. The next day, the same opponent, needing to beat John’s team twice, did just that, rather easily. Still, the triumph and the lessons remained: Creativity, teamwork, and scrappiness can go a long, long way toward success.
Forgive the personal aside, but John’s final double-header loss reminded me of my own most vivid Little League memory. I was an avid player, tiny but with some skills, yet for various reasons was sitting out the summer as a 10-year-old. Then the team of my 12-year-old brother, Haywood, who was tall and strong for his age, found itself unexpectedly short-handed due to family issues of several of his teammates. To avoid forfeits, my brother’s coach and my father together successfully petitioned the league to let me play above my age range, in the 11- and 12-year-old league, on my brother’s squad.
As it turned out, I did OK, and the team, with Haywood as the star, did great, finishing the regular season first in the league. League rules required a playoff, though, with us needing just one win while what had been the second-place team needed to beat us twice. Well, that other team had some players and a coach who were not exactly sporting. They figured little 10-year-old Quin was our team’s weak link, one they tried myriad ways to exploit.
Late in Game 1, we needed a run to tie it and two to win — and, with a runner ahead of me, I managed to scrap my way to first base (whether by walk, error, or clean hit, I don’t remember). I could have been the winning run. Instead, our opponents pulled the “hidden ball trick” on me. I was 10 years old: I had no clue what was happening. The pitcher toed the rubber, I took a tiny two-step lead, and the next thing I knew, the ump was calling me out and Game 1 over.
In the next game, the situation was reversed. We were on defense late in the game, and I covered second base for a force-out for what should have been the end of the other team’s at-bat. I caught the ball and stood there on the outer half of the bag for an extra half-second to make sure the ump could see my foot was on the base. The opposing runner, not even trying to disguise his intention, barreled through the base, his foot high, into my thigh, wiping me out while my glove and ball went flying. The ump called the guy safe. A base hit later, the runner had scored the championship-winning run against us.
I was inconsolable. Two games in a row, I had cost our team the title!
It especially hurt when, as we stood in line for our runner-up trophies, a few members of the other team openly taunted me. (This was not the ordinary behavior in that league, but this team had a few bad apples.)
Yet here’s what redeemed it: As I stood in that line, crushed and feeling guilty, Haywood stood right next to me, arm around my shoulder, whispering in my ear. “I’d go beat’em up for you if Dad would let me,” he said. And then, over and over, “Don’t listen to them. We would never have made it that far without you. We would never have made it that far without you. We would never have made it that far. I’m proud of you. You were the reason we got this far.”
I would not trade that experience, the shared endeavor on a short-handed team, my teammates’ kindnesses, and especially Haywood’s support, for anything — not for anything at all.
Nor, I’m sure, will John’s players ever forget the season that, first, they won the league on a fake-bunt steal of home and, second, for the all-star team, that they beat the reigning behemoth, at least on one day, with a bunt-steal-steal-single. They won’t forget what it felt like to be a part of it all, to be on such an amazing quest with the other families from their neighborhoods and their hometown.
And speaking of neighborhoods, a player on the team that beat us back in 1974 was a good guy who lived three blocks from me. When he saw me on the street several days later, he made a point of apologizing for his teammates’ behavior.
This is how communities should work. You learn not everything is fair and not everyone is nice but that your little platoons will support you and your family loves you — and even that not all the “bad guys” are really bad.
In peewee teams and ballet recitals, in Rotary and Kiwanis clubs, in volunteer work and at churches, or just in the neighborhood coffee shop or Waffle House where regulars gather to shoot the bull, this is how America builds communities — and how communities build America.
As de Tocqueville wrote, “Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. … Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.”
This America is our home, one we don’t need to steal. It is our gift to celebrate and protect. It is the reason we, all of us, have made it this far.
