1128

Last week I had some time to kill. Jessica was picking up her wedding dress, a shopping experience I wasn’t invited to, and so I went to a park to do some reading. I sat down at a picnic table and began to read about how they smuggled Hagrid’s dragon out of the school, and then got caught by the janitor. (I didn’t just give anything away, did I?)

A t-ball practice was underway to my right, ten third-graders spread across a field with their coach on the pitcher’s mound. A clump of parents sat quietly in the bleachers. One of the kids was swinging at the ball, missing pitch after pitch after pitch. It was cute, actually. And distracting. I watched for a few minutes as the coach asked for the T to be set up. An older girl who was acting as catcher/ball return sprang into action and set up the T. With the ball on the T, and the catcher barely out of the way, the boy swung, whacked the ball out about 15 feet, and took off toward first base. I wasn’t going to get much reading done.

As any person who’s ever watched kids practicing (or playing) t-ball for half an hour knows, you have three basic kinds of hitters:

1. The Swinger — The most populous sort, the swinger will swing at anything, badly, many times, maybe tipping the ball foul once or twice before the T comes out. He knows how to swing the bat around, but not where, and has no concept of where the ball is going and how to make his bat collide with it.
2. The Future Beer Can Crusher — The Crusher steps up to the plate and pounds his bat against it; he’s not content with a tap like the pro’s, no! The Crusher, who is wearing a helmet the size of a Civic, brings the bat down on the plate with all of his might four times and then misses two pitches before tipping one so hard it bounces out into the field.
3. The Girl — The Girl can be easily recognized by her languid, slow motion swing. Not always female (and not all females fall into this archetype of the t-ball team member), The Girl is physically incapable of swinging the bat fast enough to move it from behind his/her head to connect with the ball before the ball has already been caught and tossed back to the pitcher. The Girl gets no more than three sleepy strikes before the coach brings out the T. Every person and dog in the entire park is eagerly awaiting the T at this point, and is happy to see the next batter step up to the plate.

My mood darkened with the trees as the dropped below the horizon. A lot of my early life was spent on the sidelines of soccer fields, waiting for practice to end. Waiting for a game to start. Waiting to go home. Trying to keep the pages of my Algebra book from blowing around as I did my homework. For a few moments I watched the parents sitting on the stands, waiting patiently (?) in the cool weather for practice to end so they could take their kids home, make dinner, have them do their homework, put them to bed, and then maybe have a few minutes to themselves before sacking out.

Yikes.

There will definitely not be any little Prebles running around for a while.

Posted: Monday, October 24th, 2005 at 5:15 pm; Category: 1128; Comments feed: RSS 2.0.
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