Truesday: T-Balling And Tikrit

Back in my tooth-shedding days of tike-dom.

The whole idea of T-ball is so ridiculous, that I’m not even sure you can call it a sport. The vast, vast, vast majority of kids playing on that field have clue : NONE as to why they’re there, or what they’re supposed to be doing. Which may help to explain why the kids are willing to put up with the whole charade. You see, baseball is lame enough. As any real baseball fan will tell you, it’s a statistician’s game. A set matrix with rigidly expected outcomes, where everyone who bothers watching hopes to see just one single statistically significant outlying event that might throw off the predetermined results. Sort of like NASCAR, where most people don’t remember any race where no one was maimed or killed, because quiet races are lame races.

Thems the rules of the left-turn contest. I don’t make this shit up.

So there’s baseball, in all its sport-ish glory, where men are forced to take horse steroids so that their necks will outsize their waists, in order to do something, anything, to make the sport more palatable to non-savants and bookies. And then they magically dumb it down to a level at which children who don’t even know their right from left can play it. And tadah! You have T-ball.

T-ball gets is stupid name from the fact that five year-olds have no hand-eye coordination, and are thus wholly incapable of hitting a ball with a stick when the ball is tossed at them. It’s more likely that the child will beat themselves silly by accident. So they place the ball on the tip of a “tee”, like a big-ass golf tee, at just the perfect height for the swing of ankle-biting tots, and then the children prove why they need the tee by managing to strike out, repeatedly, even when the ball is as inert as it could possibly be. The majority of “hits” registered at any T-ball game are invariably caused by kids simply chopping down the tee itself, like a wee sapling. Thereafter, the ball naturally falls down to the ground where it gets kicked somewhere odd as the burgeoning lumberjack scurries off to either third base or the parking lot (depending on their need to make pee).

It’s quite the display.

And in a roundabout way, I can see why parents love to see their progeny out there on that field of dreams, scratching themselves and wearing mesh-back foam hats. The kids usually get hats like those too. But mainly, it’s some strange sort of proof to many parents that their child has the gravel to become a meaningful competitor in the broader game of life. I guess.

That, or it’s a great way to tire them out so they’ll actually sleep at night.

The only time I remember being conscious during a game of T-ball (two team seasons during my most formative years and I only remember one goddamn game) was after my brother and I had just finished a snot-nosed, t-shirt ripping squabble over who-knows-what, and our “coach” (I employ the sarcastiquotes because our “practices” were comprised chiefly of running around like rabid apes in some creepy/remote field, and getting bad sunburn everywhere except for our glove hand) decided that since I got the worst of the beating we traded, I should be allowed to mount the pitcher’s mound.

The probably-retarded kid on our team was no doubt distraught by this turn of events.

I shouldn’t have to explain the ridiculousness of having a pitcher in a T-ball game, but considering how the ball usually doesn’t go more than four feet from the tee, the pitcher might very well be the closest player to the ball’s post-hit resting place on the field. MIGHT, if it weren’t for most teams having the even MORE ironic position of catcher, placed behind the ever-bludgeoned tee, as if positioned there on the off chance that some Ritalin kid might start repeat-hacking at the ball like they’re mining for gold and pop it backward. Which would, of course, be deftly gloved by the finger-to-butt-to-nose-to-surprise! [repeat] catcher.

Sure.

So I strutted out there to the mound, tears still bubbling out my eyes from the brotherly fracas. Perhaps it was more of a saunter. A mosey. I did lose the squabble, after all. Doubtful that I was moving with too much bravado.

As I ascended that dirt pimple of the green-grassed earth, I turned to face that stick with a ball on it, and the kid with a stick who was practicing his swing, aiming dead for either my head or my groin. Mom was in the stands with the other ten parents who managed to show up. She was probably hopeful, maybe even excited that I was taking center stage in the theatre of T-ball.

But it was much more vacant than that for me.

After all the fuss I made, and all the hell I ended up raising that eventually landed me on that presumably esteemed hill, it turned out that my purpose would be little more than a standing target. I was, after all, a kid with no ability to catch anything but the occasional beating for throwing sticks in a pond. Well, that and the flu.

So I spent the remainder of that game, pretending it was really cool to be there in the center of a diamond, at the center of a game, at the center of a situation for which I had done an egregiously poor job of proper due diligence. So I stood around and spat a-lot, wincing at the occasional whipper that flew by my face, really helping to cement in the fact that I had no ball-catching skills worth inventorying. The coach eventually had to put the child-of-dubious-capacity back on the mound, probably fearing that I would inevitably piss myself or get knocked unconscious by an actual line-drive, however unlikely.

Apparently I wasn’t good enough at ducking and pretending to really enjoy it. I was promptly put back into the “outfield”, where my brother and I would alternate between picking at shit in the dirt and punching each other in the face. We rarely noticed if the ball rolled past us. Sometimes we didn’t notice that the innings had changed. Usually we didn’t bother wearing our gloves while out there. We still got trophies at the end of each season.

Go. Team.

It meant so much.

The trophies of Tikrit.