The Great Baseball Time Suck

Since March, I have been the head coach of the Cardinals – my son’s baseball team in the Pinto-7 coach pitch league in Redlands Baseball for Youth.

We started the year by going 0-8…not exactly a confidence booster for a rookie head coach. Working weekends and using vacation time to make time for coaching didn’t reinforce my joy for the job. I hadn’t been involved in baseball since my little league days in the 1970s and I didn’t know how to teach technique; fortunately, I had some assistant coaches who did.

Still, coaching baseball was about giving seven year olds a chance to play the game. My kids most likely won’t make the LA Dodgers, but they could absorb the virtues of the game; namely, incessant hustling, never-quit attitudes and confronting fear.

We finished the regular season at 3-11-1, or dead-last in the standings of a 10-team league.

Then today, the baseball Gods blessed us when we won our first playoff game 19-10.

I knew the season was worth the effort all along –but it’s really worth the effort when your kids, sometimes razzed at school for their horrendous record, come back to win their first playoff game.