The Greatest Baseball Story Ever Told
The Globe and the Herald both missed this story. ESPN ignored it. I’ve checked every sports site on the web and come up empty. So this is a Barstool exclusive: the story of my youth baseball team’s trip to the town championship game. All things considered, it might have been the greatest sports moment since the Miracle on Ice.
It’d be best if I start with the last inning. We were tied at 3-3, with the team I coach batting in the top of the sixth. On the mound for the other team was the prototype of a future insufferable jock in the making. He’s just a little kid, so he gets a bit of a pass from me, but I’ve coached him in football and voted him “Most Likely in High School to Give a Nerd a ‘Swirlie.’” You just know in his senior year, the cost of being on the football team for the underclassmen will be getting “tea bagged“ by this kid. I know for a fact he’s gone up to the less athletic kids and said to them “Why are you even playing? You suck.” And if you’re wondering how anyone can learn to be such a narcissist at such a young age, consider this: one time his mother told my wife her son is “such a heartthrob.” The kid was 8 years old.
Leading off for us was a big, fat, lovable, absent-minded kid with a heart of gold and absolutely no athletic ability; the Neville Longbottom to my son’s Harry Potter. During the football season, a Vegas sports book offered an even money prop bet that on any given day Neville would show up to practice without a helmet. Naturally, he’s one of The Heartthrob’s favorite targets for bullying.
It’s a cliché to say “This stuff only happens in movies.” But it’s true. Disney Studios has an entire division called “Rag-tag Group of Misfits and Underdogs Overcome the Odds to Win the Big Game Movie” Productions. But if life has taught me anything, it’s that that stuff never really happens. In real life, Johnny Lawrence kicks Daniel-san’s ass, steals Elisabeth Shue and boinks her every night on the floor of the Cobra Kai Dojo while Danny just gets laughed at in school and ends up leading a life of quiet despair in a dreary cubicle somewhere.
Our team was the underdog, no question. We barely made it into the playoffs. Our opponents, the heavy favorite, were stocked with talent. A third of my players were good, a third were OK, and the rest played like the baseball was an Improvised Explosive Device. But to a person, they were all nice kids. They goofed around and had fun whether we were ahead (not often) or way behind (almost always).
Squeaking by in each of our first two playoff games, we made it to the finals. In the other semi-final game there was all sorts of bad blood. The coach of the losing team (a guy who last summer buried my son on his bench), upon hearing my team won allegedly said, “They’re in the f-ing finals? I can’t f-ing believe it!“ To his own son.
The other coaches and I decided that our top priority was to have fun. My pre-game speech to the kids was: Enjoy this. Let’s be looser and have more fun than the other guys. You don’t know when you’ll be in this situation again, don’t miss out. Winning beats losing like Brett Myers beats his wife (OK, I didn‘t really say that), but either way I’m sleeping good tonight. We’re not supposed to be here. The pressure’s all on them. We’re the Dirt Dogs, the 2004 Idiot Red Sox. Mrs. Heartthrob might be nervous, but we’re playing with the house’s money. (This last part brought 13 sets of blank stares, so I made a mental note to drop the casino metaphors from here on out.) Even with that, in the course of the game we had to deal with three different crying episodes, but at least the pressure wasn’t coming from us.
I’d love to tell you how the coaches on the other sideline were a bunch of hard-ass, Type A, Ozzie Guillen wanna-bes, but the fact is they were all good sports. I can’t say the same for the parents. I heard more grousing about the way our teenage umpire called balls and strikes coming from the other parents than I’d hear in a month of Fenway games.
Which led me to my new philosophy of parenting. Some people are way too involved in their kids’ sports. Others are way too uninvolved. If you notice an equal number of both, than you’re right in the middle and you’re doing a good job. I’ve seen people whose house is a museum of their child’s athletic accomplishments. I know others who drop junior off at the field, come back when the game is over and never watch a pitch. Like Bill Clinton’s “Triangulation Strategy”; as long as I’m somewhere in between, I know I’m OK.
Back to the game. Heartthrob walked Longbottom and his mom was promptly put on suicide watch. A wild pitch moved Neville to second in a scene eerily reminiscent of Engelberg’s trip around the bases in the original “Bad News Bears.” You could have timed our Neville with the phases of the moon, but he made it. Eventually, he came around to score the go-ahead run and was mobbed by the team. I couldn‘t have been happier if he was my own son. It was one of those rare times in this life where something close to justice happens. We put up two more runs before Heartthrob wiggled of the hook.
We were three outs away. The first one went quietly. The second skied it a mile in the air right to my right fielder, who earlier in the game was crying after he struck out. For all my speechifying to the kid about don’t worry about it, just go out and make a play for us, he…made the play. (And proved to the world what an incomparable leader of men I am.) Heartthrob came to the plate. He hit one through the infield where it was kicked around by the right centerfielder. He made it to second but inexplicably kept running. We got him in a pickle and tagged him for the final out of the game, the first successful rundown play in the history of youth baseball. And the Championship. Cheers, hugs and handshakes all around. And beers for the coaches.
Again, I understand these are children, and I take no pleasure in the disappointment of a 10 year old. But it was nice to see what Opal Fleener tells Norman Dale in “Hoosiers”: “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass everyday.” And most of my kids had seen nothing but cloudy skies their whole athletic lives. But now they’re champions.
It wasn’t a movie, but like they say in the reviews, it was “The feel-good hit of the summer!!!” Thanks, kids.