[cardsagain74]

The Little League World Series was cancelled. Sigh. Brings back memories even more.

Once I wrote a couple stories about my childhood playing days. This is the first one; was fortunate to have something like to a "sandlot" experience one year:


When I was 9 years old, my dad coached my minor league team. You didn’t pick players for the league at that age; they were just randomly assigned. When he brought home our roster, it looked like there were more future doctors on there than ball players. And what was this….not one, but TWO girls? And Billy Hood…..who is that? (sounded like what they’d name the goofy kid from the Sandlot). So, needless to say, there were no initial signs of what was to come.

We won our first game. In the second game, we were down by four runs heading to the bottom of the 6th (the final inning in minor league and little league games) and our worst hitters due up. This was no shock as we assumed there would be plenty of ups and downs for the year. As luck would have it……the opposing pitcher could not throw a strike. Walk after walk after walk; I can still see the anguish on that poor kid’s face, especially since his coach just left him out there to burn. Before you knew it, our dugout was pounding its feet with the winning runs on base and still no one out. By then the heart of our order was up, and when someone hit a gapper to finish off the comeback, the celebration was on.

Little did we know (at the time) that the tone that had been set for the year.

As it turned out, Billy Hood was like this 6′ tall 200 pound nine-year old new kid in town (with the power to match). One of those icky girls ended up being one of the best hitters on our team. And my dad found ways to disguise our main weakness (i.e. those future doctors who couldn’t hit much). A kid named Matt and I anchored the middle of the lineup, the pitching, and the defense up the middle. And it all clicked; we probably weren’t the most talented team in the league, but we did everything well enough and played at a consistently high level.

So as it got late in the season, we still hadn’t lost a game. At that point we weren’t sure if we would, and had our eyes set on something very tough to do: an undefeated baseball season. Naturally, that was the time when it almost ended.

As any former baseball player knows, you will always have that game where nothing goes your way. And for 5 1/2 innings of our next outing, that finally happened. We were playing one of the worst teams in the league, and we never got anything going. I left a truckload of runners on base myself, and when I stranded the bases loaded in the top of the 5th or 6th with two out and just a one run lead, I was so frustrated that I could’ve cracked the aluminum bat. Because I knew we needed those extra runs (minor league games are very high scoring, so a small lead means virtually nothing).

We went to the bottom of the 6th with just that one-run lead. And even better, Matt and I couldn’t pitch anymore that day (we’d both used up our allowed innings). This left our fate in the hands of an 8 year old who’d barely pitched in his life. Needless to say, we were in trouble. Asking him to save that game for us (in this spot) was way too much….wasn’t it?

Turns out that this chubby next door neighbor had some ice water in his veins. The first hitter popped out. The next one hit a ground ball to me, and as I was throwing him out, I remember thinking “ok now it’s looking like we’ll actually escape”. Next guy: strike one, two, and three, and our newly found Mariano Rivera had just retired the side in order and bailed us out.

That was the point when you knew that it could be a special season.

The year finished up with just a single title game to decide the champion (between the teams with the two best records). So even though we’d gone undefeated, we still had to win that extra game to win the title and finish off the perfect season. Before that final game, I wrote in something like “14-0 champs” (predicting a win ahead of time) in my dad’s scorebook. And, of course, was promptly reminded not to count my chickens before they hatched and all those good cliches, blah blah blah.

He probably felt I was too overconfident. But the thing is, that wasn’t true. I knew we were beatable, especially when it came to these two other teams in the league that I considered dangerous. And had we been playing against one of those, I would’ve never assumed victory ahead of time. However…..we were up against someone else. Somehow this other team snuck into the title game against us, and it was one I didn’t have much respect for. THAT was why I fully expected us to get that one last win that we needed.

You might be assuming…..hmm ok, I wonder if this is when he learned a harsh lesson about humility at such a young age (and watched this overlooked team celebrate what should’ve been their title). Well, that didn’t happen. We grinded out the same type of wire-to-wire fairly easy win that we had for most of the year, and the perfect season was complete.

This, everyone, is an example of why sports can do so much for a young kid. That season may not have been anything outside of my small hometown that year, but to those of us who were there, it was much more than that. It taught us how to work together and how to overcome adversity, and, more importantly, how doing so can lead to accomplishments that you never thought possible. Lessons that are vital for young kids to experience.

And just as important….the memory of it all. Experiencing that one magic season where you somehow persevered in every single game, and ended the unbeaten journey with gloves thrown in the air and lifting the trophy.

It still makes me smile to this day.