For the love of the Game?

Ahhh Baseball. My favorite sport. Love to watch me some baseball. This year was Evan's third year playing. He was still in coach pitch and he did really well this year.

My boy is not aggressive, he can hit well when he wants to and can throw well but just doesn't always have his head in the game. If I had known better I would have started him playing T-ball when he was four instead of soccer which was a total waste of time. He was bored this year because he was relegated to the outfield most of the time.

As a mom, sometimes its hard to watch your kids play sports. I wanted him to do well and when he would get out (they only got five pitches whether they were good pitches or not) or threw the ball to the wrong base, I would cringe, but when he did well I was so proud. Its' not that I wasn't always proud of him it's just that I didn't want anyone else to think he wasn't good.

The league he plays in is our towns rec league. Anyone can play- you just pay your $75.00 and sign up then the coaches do a draft. They obviously pick their own kids and can pick kids they know are good but they do really well making sure teams aren't stacked. His coach this year was interesting. I know the family and they have a reputation for being hotheads. He really made the kids listen but did a little more yelling than I liked. Evan's dad coached third base so he was right there the whole time so I knew he wouldn't let it get out of hand. Another thing is most of these guys all grew up in this town and have known each other forever, They are all grown men whose kids are playing ball, not them, but I digress.

We had a few incidents in some games. When we were beating some teams sometimes the other team would say we were running our players, but every team did that at one time or another. The kids did really well and ended up 9-2, we had one game rained out and one team forfeit because of not enough players that day.

Playoffs were this past weekend with a double elimination to make it through. During the regular season kids ump the games but for playoffs we had honest to goodness real umpires. Friday was the first game and we played a team we had beat earlier in the season. It was going really well until the next to last inning when the other team tied the game. It went two extra innings until finally their team scored 13 runs on us and by the time we got them out it was 9PM and they called the game because it was getting dark. that meant we had to come back at 7:30 the next morning and play our half of the inning. The boys really tried. They scored nine runs but couldn't tie it. We won the other two games on Saturday. Sunday morning we played at 8:00, the team we were playing was one that had only beat us by two runs and we were doing well but again they tied it up. We went two extra innings again however this time, the umpire we had stated that it was going to go by international rule and the first team to get someone on first base won. We got out 1-2-3. The other team came up to bat and they got two outs but the last kid got on first so they won an advanced. Our kids did great, they were proud of themselves and that should be the end but its not.

Some of our parents started questioning why Friday nights game wasn't played like Sunday's. We would have won Friday night if it had. One of the other issues is that one of the coaches on Fridays team we played is also the commissioner of our league. Also, our coach had gotten into it with one of the other coaches and their team was mad. Since I came back to work today I have had all kinds of comments made about the "issues" our team had over the weekend. We weren't the only ones though. I talked to another mother and she said the rules seemed to change every game.

The main thing is that the game is supposed to be for the kids, not the parents. The kids are the ones who are supposed to play and learn the game. It shouldn't be about grown men competing against each other trying to keep outdoing each other like they have been doing since high school!