Budge and I recently had the pleasure to go watch one of our friend’s son play his opening day baseball game. It was a perfect day for baseball — sunny with a nice breeze blowing — and we set our folding chairs up right behind home plate.

Now the last two years, Hayes has been playing t-ball. T-ball, as the name implies, has the youngsters hitting the baseball off a tee. The ball is stationary and the tee is adjusted to whatever height the player needs, since lots of these little ones are not much bigger than the tee at the best of times. Even though the ball doesn’t move, it’s still quite possible to strike out in t-ball. Each player gets the customary three swings at the ball, and many of them miss the tee, the ball, and all three times and so have to have a seat.

This year, however, Hayes has moved up to coaches’ pitch, the next level in the baseball journey. At this stage, the player’s coach half pitches, half tosses the ball to the batters of his team. It’s interesting to see how different coaches pitch to their players. Some, like Hayes’ coach, put a little arc on the ball and it doesn’t have much on it. On the other side of the diamond, the opposing coach fairly hummed the ball in to the catcher.

This is important in the game because the harder the ball comes in, the harder it will fly off the bat if the batter manages to hit it. It’s after the ball is hit and put into play that the real fun of the game starts. In the game we watched, both teams obviously had drilled into their heads to throw the ball to first base to hopefully get the batter out. Now there’s nothing wrong with that approach except when there is a runner on third and the ball is hit to the third baseman. Rather than try to tag said runner out, or throw the ball to home for a play, the third baseman launches the ball all the way across the field toward first while the runner on third runs home.

It’s easy to get frustrated watching the game as the youngsters play, but it is of paramount importance to remember these are, in fact, youngsters. Hayes and his teammates were in the 8U division so all of them were second graders. The game has to be simplified for them or there’s no telling what might happen. The coach already has to deal with keeping the right fielder from chasing butterflies and the second baseman from playing in the dirt. It’s an improvement over t-ball, though. In t-ball, often as much as half the team doesn’t really want to be there and the scene is much akin to a cat rodeo.

Now Hayes has this year and next year in coaches’ pitch. Then, in the 10U division, the players start pitching themselves. That’s a lot of fun to watch! No one on the field or in the stands knows where that baseball is going when it leaves the pitcher’s hand and that includes the pitcher. It takes a brave kid to stand and be pitched to by one of his peers. The ball might go across the plate, but it might just as easily plunk the batter in the ribs or go over their heads to the backstop. No one really knows, and that’s part of the fun of it. They’ll get better and by the 12U division, it becomes obvious who is going to be a pitcher in the future.

On this day, Hayes and his team came up a little short. I don’t think it had anything to do with coaching since both coaches seemed competent. The players are distributed more or less at random and the other team ended up with a few more ball players than Hayes’ team did.

It was fun to watch though and took me back in time to when I tried to play baseball, but that’s for another time. Until then, love y’all and keep your feet clean!