May 15, 2005 – Passing on The American Pass-time

May 15, 2005 – Passing on The American Pass-time

Yesterday, my wife IM and I went to see out grandson MJ learn about baseball at a school athletic field in Pleasanton, California. The East Bay bedroom community is so like a U.S. city in Iowa or Nebraska. There’s a quaint downtown with a hardware store, lots of mom and pop retail stores, a down-to-earth café the locals queue up to have breakfast in on the weekends. Surprisingly, the small village center has not been overly commercialized with national retail and restaurant chains. In fact, the locals have resisted such attempts. You know it’s a California town, however, by the wine shops on the main street, the British tearoom, where IM and our daughter ME are regulars—it used to be on Main Street but has since moved slightly off Main, and the Mexican food restaurant.

At first glance the city looks ethnically homogeneous: white Anglo Saxons. Each year the city hosts the largest Highland Games in the western U.S. at the Alameda County Fairgrounds, which is within the city limits. (IM and I have gone with our daughters at different times in our lives.) However, the last time IM and I visited our granddaughter’s school for an event, we were both pleasantly surprised by the diversity of cultures represented in the school body—Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Middle Eastern cultures, Europeans, among others. When we last attended a school function all the children were singing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “Yankee Doodle,” and a number of other made-in-the-USA songs.

It was the same at our grandson’s baseball events. Fathers and Mothers from around the world converging on the park in Pleasanton to watch their 3- and 4-year olds learn the fine points of playing the All American game of baseball. Like all the others on the field our grandson, MJ, who is only three years old, was learning the basics of catching a lightweight plastic ball. For the baseball infant, catching a ball requires much more hand-eye coordination than most have developed at this young age. Hitting the plastic ball sitting atop a plastic upright that holds the ball at each kid’s waist is a bit easier and most of the young boys and girls were wracking the ball easily from the support.

Running the bases was another mystery to all the assembled infants. The practice involved getting a group of kids to run the bases en masse. Once they had learned the route, the next exercise was to get individuals to leave home, run to first, wait there for a signal and then move to second and third repeating the process at each base to reach home plate. After the group run I watched as MJ and others attempted to follow the lone runner as he made his way from home plate to first. Then, they all followed the runner who decided not to run from home to first but to head out toward second across the imaginary pitcher’s mound. To their credit, the coaches—and there were many of them on hand, had enormous patients. Most were teenagers who understood the infants far better than the parents who had higher expectations of their wee ones.

After training the kids on the individual elements of the game, groups of youngsters were lined up at home plate—there were several baseball diamonds set up, given a bat and instructed to hit the ball, run to first and wait for the next batter to hit the ball. Coaches at each base in the infield made sure that each pint-sized player moved when he or she was supposed to. MJ got to the plate, whacked the ball and at the urging of his mother ran to first base—the kid had made it to first base. As the next batter took his place at home plate and hit the ball—this kid was good and hit a nice line drive to second. In his enthusiasm, however, instead of running to first he chased the ball toward second, only to be caught midway there by his dad and redirected to first, as MJ safely tagged second. Third batter approached the plate, a cute young blond haired girl with twin ponytails. She hit the ball squarely and made a beeline for first as MJ headed for third and the young boy on first tagged second. The fourth batter takes the plate, hits the ball and all runners advance, except MJ, who decides to run off the field only to be snagged by his watchful mom and directed to home base to score.

That was about all we could ask for from our little player for the day and we collected him and his things and headed for home, where grandpa and dad had some homework to do to improve MJ’s basic baseball skills.