Their hats kept getting dirtier.
With every practice and with every game, their little black hats with the orange oriole on the fronts got a little nastier, a little older, a little more broken in, a little more grown up.
First a film of dusty beige from the opener, the game against the team in the dark blue jerseys. Infield dirt from the game against the Maroon Team. More from the game against the Greens. And the best dirt of all, the dirt that came from playing the feared Red Team, the ’27 Yankees of the 7-and-8-year-olds Coach Pitch B League.
Some hats were wet from Icees and sweat. Some were sticky, too, but not from resin or pine tar: from candy.
They were great hats.
I had never coached people this little. They’d never played anything but T-ball. So there were awkward moments, like at the first practice.
“When you play catcher, you’ll be required to wear an athletic cup.”
Puzzled looks. I was the teacher and had just introduced long division.
“Ask your parents,” I said. A good coach knows how to delegate responsibility.
Second practice: No one wanted to play catcher.
That second practice was probably our most important one of the season. The reason: each guy made up his own nickname.
The Bruiser. The Heat. Rookie. Rocket. Hotball. Fastball. The Smacker. The Blur, later changed to The Flash because, well, ballplayers will just do that sometimes. It’s a “feel” thing. You don’t ask.
Other nicknames were more mysterious. Top Catch. Dragonman. Hammerhead. The Point. Their meanings were known only to God, to administrators at the highest level of the Little League organization, and to the boys who proudly wore the nicknames in white letters pressed on the sleeves of their orange jerseys.
Those jerseys. Some wore them game day or not, along with white baseball pants and cap. Every weekday morning since the season started, I felt I was dropping my son off at a Catholic baseball school.
There were moments. The classic run-it-in from right field instead of throw it. Orioles seeing who could throw his glove the highest — during a game. An outfielder lying down in the inviting right field grass while a batter, no enemy of his, dug in. The evening Hammerhead looked at me after I struck him out on a pitch three feet outside and said politely on his way back to the dugout, his bat on his fragile shoulder, his helmet swallowing his head, “That wasn’t a very good pitch, sir.”
Heart sinkage.
Aside from the occasional whiff, we ended up being pretty good. And we seemed to have fun: We high-fived all the time and showed up looking sharp and practiced hard and played hard, and even though we weren’t supposed to keep score, I could see them over there in the dugout counting on their little fingers. We made some errors but we hit some homers, too, some frozen ropes, some shots. We ran the bases and we slide and we crossed home, and we never met a snack we didn’t like.
Dirty hats. The rhythmic smacking of gum around the diamond. Those swings from the heels, the swings of boys with big dreams.
And now it’s over. Just that quickly. We break for fishing and card-playing and a few public appearances, all the things ballplayers do in the long and lonely off-season.
We’ll gather again in the spring, and they’ll be fine boys, I’m sure, and it will be fun, but it won’t be the exact same group. It won’t be the exact same ’97 Orioles.
They gave me a spring to bronze and fold up and stick in my pocket and remember. And to them my hat, much older and (sad to say) much cleaner than theirs, is forever off.
(June 3, 1997)
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu