It’s baseball season.
I mentioned last week that baseball is the favorite season in the Archer household. In fact, the year goes like this: fall, winter, baseball, fall and so on.
Watching or playing any organized sport is not exactly my idea of a fun time. There are closets I would rather clean than run around hitting, catching, or kicking any ball. My very short elementary sports career was marked by my courtside prayers to please, God, don’t let the basketball come toward me. I never understood what the coaches told us to do, much less any strategy.
Now, as a wife, my attitude isn’t much different. I no longer play anything except a very rare game of casual softball, but I married a man who truly loves sports. He’s also a numbers guy and pours over statistics and percentages I can’t begin to understand. I once saw a young boy reading baseball stats in the newspaper. When I said that was funny, Daniel replied that was his dream for his son.
For several years, I watched the sports seasons come and go: football during the fall and winter, baseball and softball during spring and summer, and a sprinkling of basketball, hockey, and ESPN in between. I just ignored it, napping during the games and the announcers' droning. Football is a great fall afternoon lullaby.
But my blissful ignorance is changing, for the same reason everything changes: Nate. Of course, he’s a boy, which usually means bats and balls and dirt, but there’s a more powerful attraction there. He watched Daniel’s first softball game this week and was transfixed. I talked to him about the bases, home runs, and umpires, and he just sat there, still. That’s a toddler miracle.
As I watched him intently stare at the softball game and figure out way more than I could give him credit for, I realized that this game is in his blood too. There’s a reason he could throw a straight pitch before he was two and why every toy, even a broken blue crayon, is a baseball bat. This child who wears his Yankees cap every day loves baseball more than he loves LEGO and pizza.
I realized that sports will be a part of my life for a lot longer. This reluctant basketball player may just become a baseball mom and love it.