Complete Game

From the moment the first thud of a ball hitting a catcher's mitt at spring training echoed up from Arizona to, well, right this minute, our house has been pretty much all baseball all the time this summer. A sampling of the many ways it has dominated our lives.

Playing: While the twins were heartbreakingly 12 days too young to play t-ball this year, Owen was able to play in Junior Minors little league, then on the league all-star team, and finally on a travelling all-star team. The season was one of ups and downs - playing well enough to be an all-star was great for him, but the travelling team's 2-10 record against kids from other towns was a real eye-opener for all of our hometown big fish in a small pond. It's tough out there boys! Still, I loved Owen's post-game post-mortems, especially when he would excitedly tell me things like "I threw him a four seam fastball for the strikeout" (the rainbow arc of his four seamer looking oddly similar to all of his "other" pitches). Watching the 8-year olds spitting sunflower seeds in the dugout and speculating to each other whether the opposing team was using a corked bat was priceless, as was watching them grow into better players and an actual team. Overall good experience. Cooper, for his part, was content to practice almost constantly in the backyard for his future chances to play - spending hours, and often heading out by himself in his pajamas - throwing the ball up and hitting it time and again, or practicing pitching endlessly with the pitch back.

Statistics: Cooper is usually the first kid up, at which point he stumbles downstairs, unlocks the front door, grabs the paper from the driveway, comes back in and sprawls across the floor while he proceeds to study the standings and previous days' baseball statistics for the next 15 minutes. The kid literally taught himself to read last year by learning the names of baseball teams (see http://cloudeight.blogspot.com/2010/10/boy-of-summer.html) and is now a great reader of everything. In addition, he now has a grasp of baseball statistics that is amazing to me in a 5 year old still weeks away from kindergarten, studying earned run averages, how many games out various teams are, winning percentages, etc.

Lore: Owen and his friends spent the spring studying baseball history in some book at school and he certainly knows a lot more baseball lore than me already. While as a parent you can bullshit your way through a lot of kid questions, I am unable to bullshit my way through ones like "what made Rogers Hornsby so good?"; a stumper I received the other day. Hell if I know kid, although I assume it wasn't steroids since the guy played in the 20s and 30s. Hmmmmm, perhaps it was the extra s tacked onto Roger. In case you get this question parents, the things you need to know are that he has the second highest lifetime batting average ever (.358, second only to Ty Cobb) and hit over .400 an amazing 3 times.

Trading: Much to my delight, the guys have all been avidly collecting and trading baseball cards since the Spring. This has given me a convenient excuse to do the same in the name of father-son bonding. I am currently the subject of much jealousy after my acquisition of the only Darwin Barney rookie card in the house. Owen has taken his collecting to the extreme - given $15 to spend on a recent vacation, he choose to spend it on a box containing 36 unopened packs of baseball cards ... from 1990. Due to his freakish knowledge of past players, this seemed to give him as much joy as opening packs of 2011 cards, although it all seems a bit surreal. Seriously, how many other dads this summer have heard their 8 year old happily exclaim while opening a pack of cards: "Dad, I got Wade Boggs!!!" Owen and I both tried pieces of 21 year old gum from the 1990 packs by the way - BIG mistake. Deanna, for her part, could not be less enamored of the fact that cards are pretty much everywhere in our house. Despite being largely kept in binders by each kid, you can pretty much find loose cards in every room. Deanna has an old George Brett edition mitt from her youth, and the guys excitedly planned weeks ahead of her birthday to give her a 1990 George Brett baseball card using the mitt as wrapping paper for her birthday. Her excitement was palpable.

Rooting: Cruelly, I have passed on to the boys my love of the Cubs. The Cubs spate of injuries, poor fundamentals, lack of leadership and all around terrible play have left them with a terrible record and 15 1/2 games out of first in a crappy division, leaving us with precious little to root for. Still, the boys have a Cubs fan's optimism even at such young ages and ability to find hope in even the most dire of circumstances. We recently cheered as the Cubs finally put together their first three game winning streak of the season (only four months into the season!) and blasted past the Orioles to have only the third worst record in the league. Look out, Kansas City Royals, were gunning to move past you for fourth worst! Cooper in particular seems to take it all in stride, taking the news of yet another loss with a momentary sadness followed by a smile and a "maybe we'll win tomorrow." Although Hayden is less enthusiastic about baseball in general than the other two, he is a good little rooter as well from time to time. A couple of weeks ago, the whole family ventured to Wrigley family, where we witnessed the home team surge to victory in extra innings.

I have watched more baseball this summer than the previous ten years combined. The boys watch as late as we will let them and then drift off to sleep to the call of the late innings on the radio. And so it goes - the pace of our summer dictated by the unique rhythms of this most-American of games. While much has been written in recent years about the inability of today's quick-cut youth to connect with the slow pace of baseball, two of my three guys have fallen for it head over heels and appear to perhaps have lifetime afflictions. Not a bad sport to fall for, if I do say so myself; not bad at all.

Boy of Summer

One of the joys of watching kids go from squalling, helpless little balls of need to occasionally squalling, sometimes helpless four-year olds is seeing them develop their own interests and passions. So it was this summer when baseball planted a seed in four-year old Cooper that grew and flourished to the point of insanity. Our story began with a couple swings of the wiffle ball bat in the Spring (ahh, nothing signals Spring like the crisp sound of plastic on plastic, at least for four-year old baseball fans), and continues unabated to today, as the World Series limps towards its end barely ahead of the first snowfall.

Owen was in his third year this year of playing first tee ball and now baseball in our local little league. The twins won't be five until next spring and were therefore still ineligible for tee ball this year. Anyway, Owen was on the local little league Twins this spring (an amusing coincidence to our own twins). As I occasionally began to work with Owen in the backyard, Cooper began to take some turns swinging as well. He was soon hitting my underhand pitching regularly, and by the end of summer he was practically taking my head off with line drives. He was out there playing constantly, and home plate was quickly worn down to a patch of dirt. Some days I would come home to find all twenty or so of our wiffle balls lying in the neighbors yard (despite our suburban location, our neighbors are not particularly welcoming types, and have a giant pet pig that is so large and in charge that the boys won't venture through their gate to collect balls when it is out in the yard).    

Anyway, as interest grew, I decided to brush everyone up on their baseball basics and dug up a game I had bought on vacation a couple of years ago where you simulate a baseball game by flipping over cards that say things like strike, ball, foul, single, stolen base, etc. Cooper was soon obsessed with both batting in the yard and, when inside, playing the card game, constantly badgering anyone within earshot to do either. An amusing offshoot of the card game is that because the boys learned baseball rules through the game, they tend to sound like the game cards when playing real baseball in the yard, making pronouncements like "Hit by Pitch, Take Your Base" or "Strike Three, Batter Out."

By July, Cooper had moved beyond playing. Although he can't really read, he quickly mastered being able to recognize the name of each major league team in print. Every morning from mid-summer on, he charged outside for the newspapers as soon as he woke up, flipped them open to the box scores, and pored over them, interrupting whatever else was going on to make exciting announcements like "Dad, the Marlins beat the Astros 4 to 3." This led us to develop a system of categorizing the margins of victory - any game where there was a margin of victory of six or more runs is a "cream" and any victory by ten or more is a "super cream". You can imagine the excitement when the Minnesota Twins beat the Kansas City Royals 19-1 on July 26. You have never seen a more impressed group of little boys - a "super, super cream!!!"  Also in common usage in our house is the term "versing," as developed by the twins. It is a variation on the term "versus," which, if it isn't actually a word already, really should be. An example of its use is: "Who are the Red Sox versing today?"

By August, he was also poring over the standings in the newspaper, marveling at six game winning streaks and studying how many games such and such team was behind some other team. By the end of the regular season, baseball fever in Cooper had reached its most ridiculous heights. When I arrived home one night after work, Suzy the Nanny was sitting on the couch reading to Cooper and Hayden, pretty much like every other night when I arrive home. This particular night, however, she was wading through a book Cooper had chosen to check out from the library; an exciting tome entitled: "How Baseball Managers Use Math." As Cooper sat in rapt attention (Hayden's attention level looked something well below rapt, and possibly even below bored, although he was being a good sport (pun intended!)), she read "ERA is the average number of runs a pitcher gives up in nine innings. ERA is a decimal number. To calculate ERA, take the number of earned runs given up by the pitcher. Multiply that number by 9. Then, divide that by the number of innings the pitcher pitched." Tough stuff for a 4 year old, yet Cooper kept her moving through the book each day. Some of the exciting chapter names included "The Manager and His Percentages," "Keeping a Close Eye on the Pitch Count" and "Decimals and Decision Making."

On the last Saturday of the regular season, I bought a pair of tickets to the long out-of-contention Cubs and whisked Cooper off to his very first big league game. First of all, when you are a twin, it is pretty cool to go anywhere with a parent by yourself, even to the bank or Home Depot. When I told him we were going, he got a huge smile and said "Just me???" Second of all, IT WAS A MAJOR LEAGUE GAME!!!! We had a fantastic time. We ate a bag of peanuts and tossed the shells under our seats ("These are tasty!" he told me repeatedly), as well as hot dogs, soda and french fries. Cooper bought his mitt and asked me repeatedly whether I was ready to catch a foul ball when one came our way, and then assured me each time that HE was ready. Despite 5 relatively close calls, no dice. A month later, he still likes to remind me of the final score of the game (Cubs 7, Cardinals 3!) and to recall other details.

It has been a blast seeing something take hold of my little guy and stir such passion. Truly one of my favorite parts of this past summer. I sincerely hope he enjoys 96 more years of baseball love and perhaps, someday, gets the joy of seeing the Cubs super-cream somebody in the World Series.

Big Z. and Little O.

When I was about eight, my dad and Uncle took me to my first Cubs game. After the game, they took me to a Wrigleyville bar for a bite to eat when in walked Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks. Ernie graciously stopped by each table, including ours, signing programs and chatting. While I recall that Ernie politely questioned why I was wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates cap (my choice at a vendor outside earlier), he could not have been nicer and I have been a devoted Cubs fan ever since.

Now that I have sons of my own, I am intent on passing along a love of the Cubs, especially during this possibly historic season, and an appreciation for baseball in general, with its endless intricacies, rich history, and a rhythm that seems to hark back to a simpler era.

That all being said, is there any prouder moment as a Cubs fan/father than showing a picture of Cub's ace Carlos Zambrano in the newspaper to your five-year old son, asking him who it is, and having him correctly reply: "That's Big Z!". The answer, by the way, is no. I will, however, acknowledge that my moment of pride was slightly dampened when Deanna asked him how he knew which Cub that was and he answered "Because he's the fat guy." Oh well, its a start.