After blogging about my 10 year old grandson Josh’s youth baseball experience the other day, naturally, I had to do the same for my younger grandson, eight year old Connor. Now with Connor, style and looking good for the fans is a very important part of the baseball experience, as you can see in his picture above. Sporting his old school Rickey Henderson shades and shiny metallic Candy Apple red batting helmet, Connor warms up in the on-deck circle and is clearly ready for action. He had some really great hits and made a few plays in the field also. In fact, I was really impressed with how “baseball knowledgable” all the players were in the game, fielding the ball well, throwing accurately to the right base and knowing not to run on a popup if they’re on base,etc. – all the little nuances. It’s a credit to their coaches, I think. These are all kids that are eight years old or younger, and thinking back to when I played in Little League (not long after Abner Doubleday invented the game), I remember being nine years old already when I played for the first time. These days kids start with tee-ball at five and are seasoned veterans by the time they reach eight. Members of my family have probably heard this story a thousand times but i’ll tell it anyway to make a point about how far youth baseball has come since I played. That first year at 9, I played third base and wasn’t a bad fielder, but my throws to first base were terrible. I hardly ever reached the base and if I did the throw usually wasn’t in the same zip code as the base. Even kids on the other teams would say “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you throw the ball??” Well, after completing that first season, my good friend Tim, who loved sports more than anything and is the person who introduced me to all the sports I love to this day and taught me everything he knew about them, invited me to eat dinner over his house. As I was eating, he looked over at me and said “What are you doing??” With a puzzled look I replied “Eatin’ some food.” He shook his head and asked “Why are you eating with your left hand?” and of course my answer to that was easy – “Because I’m left-handed.” He started to laugh and asked why I had played the whole season of baseball right-handed. And again, my reply made sense to me anyway – “Because the glove you gave me to use went on the left hand so I figured I had to.” Needless to say my parents got me a glove that fit on my right hand for the following season, I switched over to the other side of the diamond and played first base, and even though I was never a really good player, I did a lot better and all was well with the world. Tim, of course, has gotten a lot of mileage out of that story over the years. He ran the auto insurance company I had my coverage through and once I called ahead and let him know I was coming in to pick up the insurance cards for a car I had purchased. When I walked in the door of the agency and let the receptionist know who I was she said “Oh, hi Lefty…how are you?”
