An open letter to my children’s future Little League team:
Congratulations, motivated, ambivalent, or perhaps conscripted young baseball participant! You (and hopefully not your impossible nightmare parents) are invited to join the planet’s least selective, lowest-expectation and most emotionally balanced youth sports team:
The Zen Cubs.
You may be wondering how we picked you to join an outfit like this. We didn’t! We simply took a bunch of names off the wall and threw together a roster. Whoever wasn’t wanted, we wanted—and “wanted” might be a stretch! There were no trades, no draft maneuvers, no rigging the system so we could land an All-Star-caliber shortstop. We have absolutely no idea what we have. Could be good. Could make the Bad News Bears look like the 1927 Yankees! Who cares? The mystery is part of the fun.
Now a few important words on life with the Zen Cubs:
Goals: The Zen Cubs will have no team goals other than getting exercise and having occasional amusement and trying not to break the windows on Coach’s car, although we can all agree that the latter will be briefly hilarious. If you have a specific goal for the season—hitting for the cycle, throwing an inning of shutout relief, or proving to your parents that you really hate playing sports and would prefer to go to canoe camp—you are thoroughly encouraged to chase it. If you simply want to sit on the bench and paint your toenails black and read Neil Gaiman books, that’s okay. (You will probably wind up being the person who becomes general manager of the Dodgers.)
Practice: Practices will be held once a week, for fifteen minutes, and they’re optional. You might say, Wow, that’s not a lot of practice time. And you are right. Coach and your parents are tired, they have errands to do, and let’s not all get carried away with perfection. You guys are eleven.
Extra practice: No.
Score: We will ignore.
Wins/losses/standings: Also ignore.
Statistics: Chill.
Long bus trips: Absolutely not.
Game strategy: We will show up wearing pants.
Enthusiasm: Zen Cubs will stick up for Zen Cubs. Always. We will cheer, we will clap, we will chuckle mildly—that’s chuckle with, not at—okay, maybe it’s a little bit at—when one of us runs to third base instead of first on a ground ball, but we will also pick each other up whenever someone catches a pop fly with his or her nose (and we will do that lots of times). We will scream when one of us hits a long fly ball to deep left field that looks like it’s…okay, that’s Coach’s car.
Uniforms: Remember your pants. You can pretty much get away with forgetting everything as long as you bring your pants. (Remember Your Pants, incidentally, was the original title of Little Victories.)
Dogs allowed on field: Don’t be ridiculous. Of course dogs are allowed on the field. Bring all the dogs. And the cat. Though the cat may be bored.
Turtle: Fine. The turtle too.
Daydreaming: The Zen Cubs have a very pro-daydreaming policy. Do not worry if your mind wanders while you’re standing out there in right field. If a line drive sails your way and you miss it completely because you’re thinking about what it would be like to eat a pizza ice cream sandwich, or if you’re worried you didn’t put Sprinkles the guinea pig back into the cage in Ms. Ferly’s classroom earlier in the afternoon (you didn’t, by the way), do not panic. (We will send the guinea pig to fetch the baseball. Tell Sprinkles to be careful and look out for the dogs and the cat.)
Substitution: All players, dogs, and the cat will play a minimum of one game at every position rotating around the field. (The turtle will just play first base. Sprinkles will DH.)
Hitting the cutoff man: Not sure what this “cutoff man” is. Googling that right now.
Travel team: Shhhhhhh. Don’t say it out loud. Freaks your parents out, makes them clammy and worried about how much time they’ll be spending shuttling you around in the car this summer. I’ll just level with you: Mom and Dad aren’t totally jazzed about the travel team idea.
Parents: Parental participation is welcome but by no means encouraged! Parents are asked to deliver you to the games in a punctual fashion; they may bring water and orange slices, and perhaps a Maker’s Mark for Coach, but they may not live vicariously through the ups and downs of the Zen Cubs. The Zen Cubs do not play for their personal amusement, to settle petty interparental feuds, or to realize their unrealized sports dream. They must not ask if you deserve more playing time, or if you could benefit from a two-week All-Star camp in Tallahassee, or if you “have what it takes.” (We have no idea what it takes.) Parents may not climb a chain-link fence to threaten an umpire or tackle another parent in the parking lot and roll around over a disputed stolen base. Parents who cannot adhere to these basic and very reasonable requests will be BANNED from Zen Cubs activities and also forced to take Sprinkles the guinea pig home on weekends.
That’s it. We’re going to rethink the way we think about sports. Test positive for seriousness and you will be suspended.
See you at the ball park. Nine-thirtyish, but don’t hold me to it. And don’t step on the turtle.
Your Friends at the Zen Cubs
P.S.: Pants.
★ The essential thing for all of us to remember about sports is this: they’re games. As soon as we are able to stand on our own and play sports, a cheery phrase is repeated ad infinitum by adults: It’s only a game. It sounds so good—just play the game, it’s all for fun. Then we’re dropped off at the field and abandoned to a stern-jawed coach who calls us by our last names and reminds us subtly (or not subtly) that it is in fact sliiiiiightly more than a game, that while we’re all here to have a good time and run around and learn and be good teammates, it would be also nice (very!) if you helped the team, you know…well, maybe not explicitly win, but not lose. Many parents only compound the confusion, because they’ve put their lives on hold and spent money and driven kids around and they’d really prefer to not lose too, so they’re hollering at players and coaches and referees and generally behaving as if they’re on the verge of a motorcycle bar brawl. It’s only a game shrinks as a group objective pretty early in the youth sports process, and it’s a shame, because it denies the pleasure of the experience and replaces it with an absurd delusion. Here’s the harsh truth: almost certainly you and no one with you is ever going to play a sport when it means something—like really means something, like livelihoods and incomes and business rely on it. Pretty much everything else is a game.
★ That is absolutely the best thing about sports. Fun without consequences, as the saying goes.
★ You appreciate this distinction more as you get older. Youth sports get poisoned with seriousness too early: the moments get magnified, the result becomes so achingly important, the losses are harder to take, the mistakes are overdramatized. What more could I have done? What if I’d run a little harder? Why did that chubby squirrel run off with that ground ball? When you’re older, mowed down by a job and obligations and anxieties, and you get out and exercise for a little while, you tend not to sweat the box score so much. Win or lose, you’re thrilled just because you got out of the house. You’ve exerted yourself physically, and think, Now I can eat two doughnuts without hating myself!
★ This is not to say there aren’t adults who behave like lunatics when they get out onto the field or the court or the golf course. No matter how old you are, you will encounter the Serious Player. Serious Player wants to tee off from the pro tees. Serious Player just called an offensive foul in a pickup basketball game. Serious Player definitely says that lob was out even if Serious Player does not know whether that lob was out. Serious Player went to fantasy camp, has memorized his max and resting heart rate, and is wearing compression shorts. Related: Serious Player is three times divorced.
★ When I was little, I went to go find my dad at the public tennis courts down the street from our house—there was something I needed to tell him, and I was gabbing at him from behind the chain-link fence, surely being kidlike, loud and whiny, when a Serious Player on the court next to my dad hollered over, “Hey, would you mind telling that kid to keep it down?” And my dad suddenly wheeled from me, pivoted toward the Serious Player, and took a few menacing steps toward him, racket raised. “What, are you playing for your mortgage?” my father said. And though I had no idea what a mortgage was, my heart swelled immediately: my dad was defending me from strangers who had the audacity to complain about a kid during rec tennis.
★ I also have a lively version of this story in which my father chases the Serious Player around the court, swinging his tennis racket, but I am pretty certain that never happened.
★ Of course, seriousness has invaded nearly every aspect of sports, especially from the audience/consumer standpoint. We’ve stripped them of a lot of joy. Especially when I watch college football and basketball, I am immediately depressed by the cartoonish severity of it—the fuel injection of TV cash and national pressure; the wan, humorless coaches fetishized for bizarro work ethics and neglected families. (The college kids in the stands in painted bodies look like they’re having a good time; everyone on the sidelines resembles an overworked heart surgeon at 3:00 A.M.) The pro game, meanwhile, has been neutered by its fealty to suite holders and corporate ticket buyers and a general tendency to gouge every aspect of the fan experience—$40 to park, $120 to sit down, $40 to drink, $18 if you dare to eat a hot dog and fries. It’s natural that the individual who can afford to pay these prices regularly might be tuned out, a little too consumed by accoutrements and buffets, or smartphones, or the town car coming to fetch him in the seventh inning. This disengagement is embarrassing. Every time I see an empty seat behind home plate at Yankee Stadium, I want to permanently give it to a kid. Or a bunny rabbit.
★ Youth sports might be even crazier. Youth sports make me feel a thousand years old now. They’re incredibly organized and professionalized and bear little in common with the youth sports I remember. I prefer a Little League team where three of the kids have forgotten their shoes, the second baseman might be asleep, and nobody plays left field. It’s okay to be a little ragtag. It’s okay to be the Zen Cubs. You should forget the score by the time you get to Mom’s Toyota.
★ The Little League World Series freaks me out for this reason. First, the baseball teams are so incredibly talented and technically efficient—they hit the cutoff man. They in no way resemble the Little League of my youth. But now television coverage of the event has been grotesquely expanded to the earlier regional rounds, building up thirteen-year-olds before they even make it to the main event in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Please know: as a kid I loved the Little League World Series—I would have sold my brother to the circus for the chance to play in one—but it is hard to not be turned off by all the adult business energy now committed to it. I have never understood why the TV booth at the LLWS is staffed by adults. If I ran the network, it would be three kids in blazers, eating chicken fingers, drinking Capri Suns, forgetting who’s at the plate, and laughing at each other’s farts.
★ We all had good and horrendous coaches. I had a youth soccer coach who, to his great personal entertainment and my teammates’ confusion, would refer to me not as Jason Gay but as Jason Homosexual. I had a very kind Little League coach who arrived at practice one day and told us all he’d unlocked the secret to hitting: while at the plate, close one of your eyes. It took a pretty steady two weeks of getting plunked by pitches before he agreed that it might not be a wise approach. The same coach also drafted a notorious bully who had once yanked me off my bike and pummeled me near my house before a thrilled group of kids (the slugfest ended with his celebratory jumping up and down on my ten-speed until its basket was bent). It was the worst beating of my adolescence, and not long after, the culprit found me in the hallway at junior high and got in my face: Guess what, I’m on your Little League team! Fantastic. Happy to hear it. As it turned out, he was a great hitter and outfielder, and I kind of grew to like him. Fun fact: he’s now serving a life sentence for murder. Aw, Little League memories!
★ Sports specialization is very bad; everyone seems to know this, and yet parents still believe in it, and kids are doing it more than ever. When I was growing up in the seventeenth century, a child migrated from sport to sport—a common pathway was soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring. Somewhere along the line, it became modish to stop this flighty athleticism and specialize in a single sport. Today there’s a huge industry built up to letting kids focus on one thing for twelve months of the year. You can’t find an orthopedist on the planet who thinks obsessively playing baseball or basketball or anything year-round is a good idea—they believe it accounts for a lot of the repetitive-stress and Tommy John–type surgeries they’ve seen. If you talk to professional athletes, two things you’re often struck by are 1) how few of them specialized and 2) how late they began playing their chosen sport. Some of them did not begin until junior or senior year of high school. Some even later.
★ If you ever get the opportunity to watch young athletes with a professional scout, take it. You learn very quickly that scouts evaluate talent a lot differently than we do. For example, the star of the team, the small but balletically coordinated kid racing up and down and making everyone else look bad? The scout is probably not interested in him or her—that kid has peaked. The awkward kid who is long-limbed and can’t score and looks ready to fall asleep on the bench but had that one moment where he or she jumped four feet in the air? Yes. The scout would like a word.
★ When I am around elite professional athletes, I am always amused by how we’ve all agreed to forget what surreal miracles they are. Even the mediocre ones we complain about on sports radio—they’re flukes from a long, illogical, near-impossible road we all once started on. Yes, these athletes work incredibly hard, and yes, they are dedicated, but making it to the pros is also a destruction of long odds. During a postgame interview, you just want to say to somebody playing pro basketball, Do you realize you’re playing pro basketball? Isn’t that nuts? The good players realize it’s crazy. Roger Federer is like this. On occasion I’ve seen Federer at a press conference after a loss, and a question will come that suggests he should be morose, as if a train has just hit his dog, and Federer will grow a little snippy and fix the interrogator with a glare that says, Do you realize what amazing good luck it is to be me? And it is. (I like to imagine Federer saying everything while wearing a gold cape and petting an albino tiger.)
★ I am bracing for my own chapter as a sports parent. I hope I am restrained. I hope I maintain proper perspective. My dad’s strategy for maintaining proper perspective was not going—I seldom saw him at a game, and if I did, he usually had his face buried in a book. I don’t think that was bad or aloof parenting. I think my dad, a coach himself, was giving kid sports what he believed was absolutely the proper amount of attention, which, to him, was little attention at all. (My dad did, however, march onto a field during an active Little League game and yank me from the pitcher’s mound—and he was not the coach of this team—after one particularly gruesome report card arrived in the mail.) I tell myself I will care the proper amount. I will never yell. I will never push. I will never walk my kids home after a game and relive a bad play or a missed opportunity. I will not live vicariously through their sports misadventures; I will not pick fights over playing time or peruse intense one-week off-season sports camps on the Internet. We will keep things amateur and loose. I will remind myself that there’s almost a zero chance that my child or any child around will reach the professional stage, not to be a jerk but to dial down the obsession. I vacillate between telling myself that I will never coach and wanting to be the coach of a team that does things the right way, that doesn’t care about wins and losses and prohibits obsessiveness and crazy parenting and sets an example for the rest of the league. I would take a team like that to the Little League World Series. We could just hang out in the parking lot and let the air out of the tires of the ESPN trucks. Maybe it’s those Zen Cubs, happily anchored at the bottom of the standings, playing with no expectations, daydreaming at the plate, missing the cutoff, turtle in the outfield, playing a game like, you know, a game.