Twice as nice: one brother throws left and bats right; the other throws right and bats left, and now they're finally together on the same baseball team, fulfilling a father's dream

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 2008 by Wayne M. Barrett

OF ALL THE REAL AND IMAGINED joys of parenting, I cannot escape the cliched--but wonderful--experience of watching my boys play Little League baseball together. In past winters, when they shared the same basketball court (Alex as a power forward and occasional small center with pretty good ball-handling ability; Trevor the nimble point guard who seems to be everywhere at once) or hockey rink (both able, stay-at-home defensemen, although I still insist on calling them The Rocket and Pocket Rocket after the legendary goal-scoring Richard brothers--Maurice and Henri--of Montreal Canadiens' fame), a father's pride was quite evident... my chest puffing out almost as far as my bulging middle-age gut.

They also are fine soccer players--as is their older sister Julie, a speedy (and, this season at least, high-scoring) midfielder whose feisty tenacity in battling for loose balls belies her angelic (at least according to her dad) looks--with the younger Trevor (8) tagging along with Alex (10) to Travel Team soccer practices and even jumping into some scrimmages and summer league games if the club was short a player. Still, I yearned to see them on the diamond together. The opportunity came when Alex--a flashy-glove-but-only-okay-hitting first baseman--unexpectedly made the Travel (or Tournament) Team last summer. The manager and one of his coaches double as board members for the local "inhouse" baseball league, so I seized on the chance to plead my case: Trevor, while no superstar, was good enough to play with the older kids, and since the next league up was now a combination of nine- and 10-year-olds, why not make his old man happy and let him move up to be with his brother? The clincher came when I pointed out that the boys' basketball coach also managed baseball, and Trevor would be with all his teammates from the hoops squad--and, if he was old enough to play basketball with those guys, why not baseball, too? The league relented, and my boys, much in the tradition of the renowned Waner Brothers----Paul and Lloyd (Big Poison and Little Poison) of the Depression-era Pittsburgh Pirates--found themselves on the same roster. As an added bonus, the manager lost his bench coach of the last three years, and asked me to step in. (Is this too good to be true, or what?)

Now, to backtrack, I already had received one of those slow-down-big-fella lessons from Alex, who, although he is the spitting image of yours truly, thankfully has the heart and mind of his mother. Come springtime, when the local elementary schools are abuzz with Little League talk--what team are you on? who's your coach? when's your next practice--Alex felt out of the mix. Since the expanded Travel-Tournament Team schedule now impinged on the spring (and, as mentioned, he also was playing Travel Team Soccer, which is a fall and spring sport), I told him that playing in-house baseball would be too much: Concentrate on your Travel Teams, I commanded----it's like being an All-Star in two sports. What I forgot was that, despite all his smarts, talent, and maturity (yeah, that's his father talking again), he's still just a tender-hearted kid. When asked at school by his classmates about what team he was on, the response of "Travel Team" only brought blank stares and disappointment. He wanted to play with--and against--his Mends, and they him. He didn't want to be a two-inning, one-at-bat-a-game Travel Team outfielder who only faced out-of-town clubs with players he'd never seen before; he wanted to have fun, be able to catch and pitch and play first base, razz his pals on the other clubs, enjoy the camaraderie of his teammates, not feel so much pressure. He came to me with pleading eyes: Why does it only have to be Travel Team. Can't I play with my friends, too?

Well, beck, sometimes we (as in me) walk around with blinders. Baseball is Alex's favorite sport, and I figured he'd want to play for the best team possible, so I convinced him (wrongly) that the Travel-Tournament Team is where he belonged. Despite evidence to the contrary, I'm not one of those parents who pushes his kids into things they don't want to do or one of those frenzied fathers who screams like a maniac at games, threatens umpires, or gets in the faces of coaches who don't give my son the amount of playing time I think he deserves.

Another thing I definitely have not been guilty of is a pair of all-too-common traits of fathers who coach their offspring--they either favor their sons in playing time and what-position-to-play decisions, or they are overly critical of the poor kid in front of his teammates, or both. I'm simply too grateful to act that way. For instance, one little slice of Nirvana came during a preseason exhibition game when my boys were flip-side, back-to-back batterymates: Alex pitching to Trevor one inning, then Trevor pitching to Alex the following frame--with me as the volunteer ump when the regular arbiter failed to show.

Moreover, the manager is the perfect Yin to my Yang. He lets the kids play wherever they want but, come the late innings, if we're protecting a lead, he takes my advice and fields his best defensive team. In our last victory, that entailed Alex at first base and Trevor, usually the early-inning catcher, manning second for the opposition's final at-bat. That also was the game where our starting pitcher, despite an early six-run lead, was struggling with his control and quickly running up his pitch count with a cavalcade of bases on balls. The manager was going to pull him in favor of the kid who was supposed to start our next game (against the best team in the league). "Why not," I suggested, "let Alex try to get out of the inning? This way, you can save Joe for that big start on Saturday." Alex, who has this somewhat bizarre quasi-hesitation... sidearm-submarine delivery that produces a sort of backup screwball slash changeup, ended up throwing three innings of one-hit, one-ran ball--I just love a crafty southpaw, especially when he's my son--to get the "hold," the latest newfangled statistic for relievers. The proposed weekend starter came in to hurl a scoreless final frame for the save in a 6-3 victory. Not only was his pitch count paltry enough to ensure his weekend start, but the manager says he'd like to see Trevor pitch some, too. Am I imagining things, or did somebody just whisper "Dizzy and Daffy Dean"?