Tag Archive for Little League baseball

Baseball, Gavin, Six Innings, Championship Games, etc.

I don’t like to brag, but.

Look at this kid, will ya.

That’s Gavin, right around his 11th birthday, back in June/July. We endured a heartbreaking All-Star experience and I had to let time pass before revisiting it.

This year, along with my friend Andy, I coached a team of ten-year-olds in the District 13 All-Star Tournament. We played five games and found ourselves in the Championship Game — a scenario not much different than what I wrote about in the book, Six Innings (now in paperback).

As it turns out, that was the problem. Six innings. Would it were five.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Gavin really shined in this tournament, played the best baseball of his life. Pitched a shutout, fielded great, hit a ton. He was focused and he cared and somehow it all came together for him.

As a parent, you love ’em whether they strike out or hit a double. And let me tell you — it’s easier when they hit the double.

So there he was on the mound to start the Championship Game against our talented arch-rivals. It was a tense game, all the boys felt it, and nerves got the best of many of them. Both sides made errors. By the top of the 6th, we were on top, 10-6. Gavin had pitched with poise and determination, but after throwing five full innings and 75 pitches, the Little League maximum for boys his age, it was time to turn the ball over to someone else.

We had a four run lead. We needed three more outs.

Never happened. Our rivals exploded for 11 runs (!) in the 6th — it was the longest, most brutal inning of my coaching career — and we fell, 17-10, with an ignoble thud. Gavin was seriously bummed. For my part, I slept less than two hours that night. Just tossed and turned and replayed it all in my head, over and over. It was a week before I could walk without a limp.

When you write a book, you can get that last out, the boy can kiss the girl, you can pick any ending you want. Real life, that’s a tougher thing.

So let’s look at that scene from Six Innings one more time . . .

Max takes the sign, nods, understands. He wants me to climb the ladder.

One last time, Max Young is alone in his daydreams, throwing against an imaginary hitter in a game of his own invention. He is the author and the instrument, the pitcher and the ball, the beginning and the end.

Max rocks back into his windup, he drives forward, the ball leaves his fingertips, comes in high and hard and true.

Angel Tatis hits nothing but air. Swing and a miss.

That’s it. Game over.

Max drops to his knees, flings his glove high into the sky. All the boys rush the mound, shouting, screaming, piling on . . . .

Sigh.

Deleted Scenes 4: Six Innings

The Little League season has taken a turn. The regular season is gone. My team of 9-, 10- and 11-year olds finished with a strong record, 11-5, good enough for 2nd place. They were my cardiac kids; we lost five games by a total of seven runs. Now I’m coaching a team of 9-year-old All-Stars. We’re practicing every day. And at my local Little League at Magee Park in Delmar, New York, there’s the big championship game tomorrow. The 12-year-olds, the Majors. Two of my friends are the rival managers. I’ll know many of the kids on the field. It is the exact circumstance, recurring annually, that inspired my book, Six Innings.

——

During the revision process for Six Innings, I cut more than 10,000 words, much of it back story. When I first started writing it, even before I thought about the game itself, I wrote all sorts of stand-alone character pieces that had nothing (and everything!) to do with the championship game, the book’s six innings.

Sometimes when I speak with students, we’ll talk about the importance of character, as well as the maxim, “Show, don’t tell.” In this scene, I wanted to show readers something about Dylan Van Zant, his determination, his stick-to-it-iveness. But also: let them know that he choked under pressure once before, because we’re going to see him in a similar situation one hundred pages down the road. I could have told the reader, “Dylan tenses up sometimes, freezes, but he’s also a very determined guy.” Instead, I invented this little story about a foul-shot contest. Or actually, two contests: The first one, his response to losing it, and then the second contest.

I ended up cutting the whole shebang. But somehow  the book is better for it just the same, because by writing I learned everything I needed to know — and show — about this one character, Dylan Van Zant.

The sample below is taken from the middle section, which I labeled at the time, “Headlights.”

——-

Dylan began practicing for next year’s foul-shooting contest on the very next morning.

He was the first in the house to awake. Dylan didn’t brush his teeth, comb his hair, or eat breakfast. He just threw on some shorts, his sneakers, an Under Armour t-shirt, and stepped onto the driveway. The free throw line was already marked off. Dylan walked to it, head down. He bounced the ball rhythmically — boom, boom, bah-boom; boom, boom, bah-boom — alternating hands, remembering the agony of yesterday’s missed shots. Clang, the ball hitting the rim and bouncing away. The tightness in his arms, the dryness in his mouth. That taste of failure.

Dylan took one hundred foul shots. That was the bargain he struck with himself. Every morning, he would go outside and shoot free throws. Most mornings, he kept the promise. Sometimes, life intervened. So he’d shoot in the afternoon.

One particular day, Dylan overslept, raced to school, and worked on a science project late into the night. It was past his normal bedtime. Darkness had fallen, and with it rain; the court was cloaked in velvet. So Dylan asked his mother to please, please, please pull up the car and turn on the headlights. And there he stood at the line in the shimmering dark, knees bent, eyes on the rim, firing up free throw after free throw until he was satisfied, and soaked, and cold. The day’s bargain complete.

The contest would not be for another nine months.

This time, vowed Dylan, I’ll be ready.

———

For other deleted scenes from Six Innings, click here, and here, and here.

A little trivia: the name Dylan Van Zant brings together two of my favorite songwriters, Bob and Townes, who wrote one of my favorite songs ever, “To Live Is to Fly.”

Fathers & Sons & Baseball

Fathers and sons and baseball. You can almost hear the violins, the sap rising from the roots. It’s a tired cliche, of course, but that doesn’t render the dynamic meaningless.

My father wasn’t a sports guy; I can’t remember him ever turning on the television to watch a game of any sort. Hey, I can’t remember having catch with him. But I had four olders brothers, and my baseball-loving mom, and a dozen kids on the block for that. Dad was Old School. I think of him as more CEO/CFO in Charge of Household as opposed to today’s helicopter-styled parent, forever hovering, eager to bond and share and become best buddies. That wasn’t my father’s way.

So, basically, I played Little League and my father did other things. And I want to make this clear: It was perfectly okay. But one year, when I was ten years old and playing for the Cardinals — astonishingly vivid memories of those games — somehow my father got roped in as a coach. He didn’t know a blessed thing about baseball. Didn’t care to know. The manager, hard-nosed Larry Bassett, taught my father how to keep the scorebook and I’m fairly certain that was the full extent of his usefulness.

I found it embarrassing. Not horribly so, but it felt odd to see my father on the ballfield, clueless and unathletic. What did the other boys think? It was 1971 and my dad was painfully uncool. I loved baseball deeply, passionately. In that sense, we lived on separate planets. Of course now, years later, I see it from a different perspective. And it boils down to this: He was there. As a parent, isn’t that 98% of the job? Just showing up, day after day. Being there. My father is gone now, died almost two years ago, fell on the front lawn and never got back up. Maybe that makes you (me) appreciate those times, those presences, all the more. For he will never “be there” again.

He never read Six Innings, either. If he did, I would have told my father that I loosely modeled a character after him, Mr. Lionni, Alex’s dad, right down to the thick-framed glasses and questionable attire, the black socks, brown loafers and shorts. There’s a scene when Mr. Lionni takes his baseball-loving son, Alex, for extra batting practice. That scene sprang directly from my childhood; I remember the one and only time my father pitched batting practice to me — awkwardly, poorly, like he was hurling foreign objects. But I was struggling with the bat, the same as Alex in my book, and that man, the father, tried to help the best he could.

In Six Innings, it’s a minor scene (pp. 56-58), just a little backstory about one of the boys on the team. But for me, it resonates across the years, like an echo across a vast canyon. My dad and baseball. Our moments together on the diamond, a burnished memory, glowing like hot coals almost forty years hence. He was there. I didn’t appreciate it then, though I certainly recognized the uniqueness of the event; I was just a boy. But that’s what writing gives us, the opportunity to revisit, revalue, remember in the root meaning of the word — to re-member, to make whole again, to bring those disparate things together. Me and Dad and baseball.

Postscript: Oh, yeah, about the name Lionni. That’s another tribute to a great children’s book author by the name of Leo. Someday I should put together a full roster. I see James Marshall manning the Hot Corner, nimble and loose; Maurice Sendak on the hill, strong-armed and determined; maybe sure-handed Bernard Waber over at second base . . .