Youth Baseball in Spring — Cold, Long and I Love It

Youth baseball. A sport with varied skill levels. Some kids can knock the cover off the ball. Others have never put on a baseball glove before. You can tell these latter kids because they always put it on the hand they throw with.

Baseball is a sport with no time limit, no clock. The games could last forever. Literally.

It is a sport played outside, during the unpredictable weather of the spring. Games rarely get canceled, making for some interesting situations.

This season, those windy 40-degree days made me thankful for the other 165 hours of the week I wasn’t sitting in a cold lawn chair freezing at a youth baseball game. It made me consider bringing that Bailey’s Irish Cream leftover from St. Patrick’s Day. That stuff’s not going to drink itself, you know.

Even for the fans (parents) who didn’t like watching baseball, there was plenty of people-watching to be had. My favorite was the 6-year-old who had his own batting gloves, eye-black, bat, helmet and special baseball bag, and still did not know which side of home plate he was supposed to stand on while batting. I’m guessing the inside of his house looks like a Dick’s Sporting Goods. And that one of his parents is a baseball fanatic.

Of course, it wouldn’t be youth sports without a parent who coaches from the stands. This dude corrects every part of his kid’s batting stance, during a game, while the kid is batting.

I’m sure as much as I was watching other families, other families were watching our crew as well. We were the family with the wagon, several lawn chairs, a blanket, a snack and drink cooler, kid bikes and kid scooters. We were a traveling circus sideshow.

My daughters always “accidentally” sat in the wettest grass right at the beginning of the game or practice, too. This guaranteed complaining for the rest of the entire time. At games, I required them to wait until they’d seen their brother bat twice before they visited the concession stand. We gave them a limit of spending $4 each (their own money). The good news about all of this? They paid attention to the first couple of innings, and for eight bucks, our two girls could basically buy anything they wanted from the concession stand. A sleeve of powdered doughnuts at 2 p.m. on a Saturday? Why not?!?

As my son’s youth baseball season wraps up, it has been one his mom and I have enjoyed quite a bit. Even though it’s 40 degrees this week, there’s at least a 50 percent chance it will be 90 degrees next week. But, if it is cold those final weeks of the season, we could take advice from my son and “lay face down on the ground putting us close to the Earth’s mantle.” This, he says, will keep us warm.

Good grief. That kid’s not normal.

A version of this originally appeared on Indy’s Child. Photo: Insight Imaging: John A Ryan Photography via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA.