My first practice as a tee-ball coach, or “Coach Papa,” as my son calls me, ended with at least four children in tears. I’ll take most of the responsibility for this. Maybe, just maybe, it was a bad idea to let them dive on top of each other while chasing ground balls. But in my defense, I was in way over my head: I’d never been tasked with overseeing a group of 12 preschoolers before, so when they started acting like feral jackals, I didn’t have the capacity to wrangle them into something resembling structure.
Our third baseman was wearing a helmet, backward. Our second baseman was doing pirouettes in the outfield. Only half the kids, if that, were wearing gloves. The evening had gotten away from me, from us all, and it had happened under the judgmental glare of parents on the other side of the fence.
When we got home that evening, I numbly ate two slices of veggie lovers pizza and collapsed face-first into bed, feeling more dejected than I had in a long time…an absurd statement, considering a bunch of tiny humans with mouths full of baby teeth were making me feel this way. “Get it together, Coach Papa,” I whispered to myself while lying face-down on my beloved millet pillow.
It’s a curious thing, coaching tee-ball. It’s easy to forget that children don’t innately understand even the most basic rules of the game. To my surprise, and my slight disgust (kidding), babies don’t exit the womb knowing the location of first base, or that they have to run to first base, or that they have to run at all. This may sound obvious, but it’s easy to forget, especially for someone like me, who has loved baseball for almost three decades. Among the things that children don’t instinctively understand about the sport include, but are not limited to: how to properly wear a helmet, how to shake hands after a game, and that they aren’t supposed to fight each other for the ball. We’re working hard on that last one: no matter how many times I remind them they’re on the same team, they blackout when the ball is hit and forget everything I said. We’ll get there. Maybe.
I went into that first practice with a structured plan worthy of a Tom Emansky video, only to scrap the whole thing once I realized I had to teach these kids how to don a helmet before I could even think about putting them through an intense hour-long regimen. I’m co-coaching the Pleasant View Developers, for chrissake, not managing the New York Yankees. I don’t want to devolve into a version of my brother’s tee-ball coach from the late ’90s, a guy who changed league rules so that the score was kept for each game, and when his team inevitably finished undefeated, ran a photo in the local paper so the whole community knew his squad had achieved perfection. Tee-ball isn’t, and shouldn’t be, about perfection. It’s about giving kids their first exposure to a game that some will love for the rest of their lives, and others won’t think about again beyond this spring. It’s also, of course, about allowing them to expand their social circles while having some loosely-structured fun. Tee-ball, at the end of the day, is basically an abstract impressionist version of baseball: the form kind of resembles the actual thing, but only if you squint hard and use your imagination generously. Imperfection is the point.
The day after that disastrous first practice, I stumbled upon a thoughtful article on a website called Baseball Positive that made me rethink my role as a tee-ball coach. To wit:
As adults, we’re going to the park thinking ‘baseball,’ while the kids are going to the park thinking ‘I get to see my friends and run around a lot.’ Tee-ball is a playdate with a baseball theme…If we approach the season for what it is, spending time with our child and their friends, watching them run around and laugh while they work to develop skills to catch, throw and hit that little ball, then we can have a great time as coaches.
Somewhere, my brother’s perfectionist coach is either rolling his eyes or rolling over in his grave.
***
Baseball is a special game, a weird game, the love of which usually either takes root in childhood, or not at all. I love baseball for many reasons: its Americanness, its multiculturalism, its humor, its humanity, its unlikeliness, its everydayness, the way it seamlessly weaves itself into the fabric of the seasons, beginning with a rebirth in spring and continuing like a steady train through the summer before fading in the fall just as the weather is starting to turn. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that stuff as a kid in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when I spent summer days immersed in Cubs games on our low-definition fat screen TV. I was simply in awe at the spectacle of televised baseball: the anticipation in Chip Caray’s voice as the broadcast began, the soaring national anthem, the look of focus on Kerry Wood’s peach-fuzzed face as he stared down a hitter, the way my pulse would quicken every time Sammy Sosa, a superhero in supertight pinstripe pants, stepped to the plate. I was, and still am, a diehard fan: my first fitted Cubs hat lived on my head until it became so ragged and smelly that it was forced into retirement.
One of my earliest baseball memories is watching Wood, that hard-throwing Texan, strike out 20 Houston Astros as a 20-year-old in 1998, a feat accomplished only five times in Major League history. It was the height of the Steroid Era, that absurdist chapter in the sport’s history in which comically veiny dudes smashed 50-70 home runs a year like they were whacking golf balls at the driving range. The reckoning would come later on, in Supreme Court hearings I tried to ignore, but to live through it, especially the home run race of ’98, was exhilarating. It’s one of the fundamental memories of my childhood: Sosa and Mark McGwire, both of whom were so obviously juicing that it’s laughable, went bash-for-bash in August and September, racing toward Roger Maris’ record of 61 round-trippers. They both annihilated it, in typical Steroid Era-fashion: Sosa finished with 66. McGwire reached 70. I can still remember, in that hazy sepia-toned way, sitting on the carpet of our living room as McGwire blasted the record breaker, against the Cubs, of all teams. He was so giddy with excitement that he missed first base and had to scramble back to touch it, like a 12-year-old celebrating his first home run.
Watching that clip on YouTube now, it’s easy to be cynical about the moment. McGwire’s forearms are the size of bazookas, and he’s as top-heavy as a mutant sunflower. It’s clear he never would’ve broken the record had he not pumped his body full of HGH like some kind of hormone-bloated chicken. Yet I find it hard to hold any malice towards him or Sosa, or even the oft-maligned Barry Bonds, who broke McGwire’s record by hitting 73 home runs three years later. Sure, maybe those guys were sketchy cheaters who cast a dark cloud over an entire decade of the game’s history, yada yada, but their otherworldly power was a thrill to watch. They brought so much joy to the summer days of my youth, as I sat in the living room waiting for Sosa to launch another ball into the bleachers, that I hereby forgive them for tarnishing the so-called purity of the sport, or whatever.
***
My obsession with baseball waxed and waned in the intervening years, as it often does for people as they grow older. It was perhaps at its peak in 2003: I was 14 years old, and the Cubs led the Florida Marlins three-games-to-two in the National League Championship Series. They were five outs away from reaching their first World Series since 1945 when the infamous Steve Bartman incident occurred, followed by the often overlooked but equally crucial error by shortstop Alex Gonzalez, described beautifully and vulgarly in a scene from The Bear. This confluence of bad luck and crappy defense allowed the Marlins to stage a comeback and eventually win the series, further confirming that the Cubs were, indeed, a franchise cursed by a billy goat. I cried harder that night than I had any right to cry over a sporting event played by a bunch of pampered millionaires, but give me a break: I was an emotionally volatile teenager, and my world at the time was very small.
I’d follow the Cubs semi-closely for another eightish years, but my childlike enthusiasm for the game dissolved entirely by the end of college. I’d grown jaded by the capitalistic excess of it all, by men-children making millions of dollars to play a pointless game while normal people who worked jobs crucial to a functioning society lived paycheck-to-paycheck. The world would collapse in weeks, perhaps days, without nurses, but it wouldn’t miss a beat without shortstops. When the Cubs finally shook the curse and won a World Series in 2016, for the first time in 108 years, I was excited, but also felt like a fraud, considering I hadn’t cared about them in over half-a-decade.
Indeed, baseball barely crossed my mind from 2010-2020. I didn’t start following the sport again in earnest until 2023, when I splurged on an MLB TV subscription. I was surprised by how quickly that familiar sense of wonder returned to my soul, like a long-lost brother. When I watch a game now, I feel like a 12-year-old again: my skin tingles when the broadcast cuts to a wide-angle shot of Wrigley Field, my cheeks flush with adrenaline every time the Cubs win in dramatic fashion. I’ve allowed myself to enjoy the game for what it is – low-brow yet poetic, boring yet exhilarating – without being disheartened by the business side of things.
I watched every Cubs game in 2023 and 2024, and plan to do the same this year, to the eternal shrug of my wife. She doesn’t dislike baseball, she’d just prefer it not to be on TV every day from March through October. Her coping mechanism for enduring the months-long slog is to objectify the players. Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson, with his rugged beard and luscious locks, is her main man. Truth be told, he’s mine too, even if he can’t hit an offspeed pitch to save his life. She thinks outfielder Cody Bellinger is “hot, in a smoldering way,” but he was traded to the Yankees in the offseason, so we won’t be seeing much of him anymore. So it goes.
I feel sorry for her. Our son, Conley, has caught the baseball bug, too. He’s called the sport “go-ball” since he was, like, two, and it’s so adorable that I’ve yet to correct him. Sometimes he’ll say “Papa, let’s cuddle and watch go-ball,” and my heart immediately liquifies and leaks from the soles of my feet. I recognize the look of wonder in his eyes as he watches a Cubs game: it’s the same wonder I felt all those years ago watching McGwire and Sosa go tit-for-tat. When Conley takes the plate for his tee-ball squad, he tells me he wants to slug it “like Dansby Swanson,” though in truth, he’s more like Cubs’ center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong: a young lefty with a hyphenated last name. We’ve watched this goosebump-inducing clip of Christopher Morel hitting a walk-off homer more times than I can count, and it often causes Conley to run around the living room while trying to rip off his shirt, just like Morel. When we practice his swing in the front yard, he regularly refuses to hit off a tee because he wants me to pitch it to him “like the Cubbies.” I tell him that all those guys he watches on TV, the Dansby Swansons and the Pete Crow-Armstrongs, started by playing tee-ball, and when he gets bigger, he’ll get to play baseball just like them. Still, he demands I throw it to him, no matter how many times he swings, misses, and collapses onto the grass in a mixture of laughter and tears.
***
What I’m trying to get at, with that long-winded tour of my personal history with baseball, is that tee-ball is where it starts. Its chaos lays the groundwork for future poetry: without it, something as beautiful as, say, Ken Griffey Jr.’s swing never would’ve existed. I understand what it feels like to be in Conley’s shoes, stuck with tee-ball while the players you idolize on TV, and kids just a few years older than you, are playing the real thing. And for me, as a coach: it may not feel like I’m doing much to cultivate a love for baseball when I watch my players battle for a ground ball like they’re in an Irish rugby scrum, but if just one of these kids goes on to develop a lifelong appreciation of the game, I’ll be content knowing I played some small, almost imperceptible, role. Baseball is a friend we can take with us until we die, sometimes literally: my great-grandfather croaked in his recliner while watching a Pirates game, a black cap pulled tightly over his eyes.
Maybe we’ll learn some things along the way. Perhaps, by season’s end, we’ll have taught the kids that the goal of playing defense is to work together. But I won’t be devastated if that truth doesn’t sink in. No one’s keeping score, much to the chagrin of my brother’s former tee-ball coach, wherever he is now. I’m no Tom Emansky, nor do I need to be. If I can show these kids how to wear a helmet the right way, swing a bat without hitting someone else in the shin, and shake hands in a straight line after the game, all while keeping the tears to a minimum, I’ll have fulfilled my duty as Coach Papa.
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband, and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag. He can be reached at [email protected].
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