Sports, Parenting and Rage

Cameron's baseball team has had, I think, three games and several practices. They have had a player on base only two times, never scored a run, and they walk about a dozen batters from the other team every time they play defense.

It's the first year that the kids are doing the pitching, and it's been a painful experience.

All of the pitchers that have pitched to our kids are throwing the ball so fast that our kids can't connect to save their lives, and yet, when we pitch, we're lucky to get it in the strike zone and when it does the ball is going so slow that it barely makes it to the plate and it's a cinch to hit.

It's been very, very ugly.

I am not one of those moms who signs her kids up for sports to groom them for their college days and Andrew, believe it or not, is certainly not the kind of dad who pushes his kid to train and practice their sport every spare moment they have and yells criticism from the sidelines. We put our kids in sports if they express a desire to play and to learn skills and have fun. We have no grand assumptions or requirements that they use these experiences to secure a scholarship down the road.

But no kid likes to lose. It's much more fun to win, or at least to score.

And I think that everyone on Cameron's team is getting discouraged. But that's no excuse for the behavior of one kid on our team.

We happen to have a kid on our team who thinks he is the star, and while he probably is one of the best players on the team, he is certainly nothing to get excited about. He gets excited enough about himself without help from anyone else.

So this kid decides last night that because he is the self-proclaimed star of the team, he has the right to coach the other players. He tells them where they should be standing, how they should be standing, when it's their turn to bat, how to swing when they are on deck - the whole bit. By the time the first inning was half over, I was ready to knock him up side the head. And where was his mother? In the bleachers, completely aware of what he was doing and saying nothing.

So obnoxious was this child that I was standing at the sidelines plotting evil things to say to him, but deciding that I would be satisfied if he just struck out. (Yes, I was wishing for a kid on our team to fail, but trust me, he needed a little humbling.) I got my wish. He stood there at home plate waiting for the perfect pitch and consequently struck out by failing to swing at three perfectly acceptable pitches. Arrogant little punk.

So what does Star Player do? He uses his bat to beat the heck out of the dugout wall and points his finger at the pitcher and yells about how the pitches were not in the strike zone. (They absolutely were.)

What kind of parent raises a child to feel such disappointment at failure, to blame it on someone else, and to act in such a violently inappropriate way? His mother hollered from the bleachers that it was OK!

No, it was not OK.

She should have walked her rear-end over there and explained to her kid that while it was alright to be disappointed, it was not alright to take out his frustrations on the city's property, nor was it OK to be such a poor sport.

Perhaps her jeans with the fashionable holes much too close to her bikini line were too tight to allow her to walk at all.

So on we went with the rest of the game/massacre, and it was our turn to play in the field. We had a poor little pitcher who was trying his hardest to throw the ball into the catcher's mitt, but it was all over the place and often never made it all the way to the plate. He walked five players before he started to cry. Our coach went out and gave him a pep talk, told him not to give up, and let him continue pitching.

And that's when a kid on the other team started heckling our pitcher. He was standing on second base, right behind the pitcher's mound. He was on second base because our pitcher had thrown him four balls. Not because he had hit the ball, so he really had nothing to feel superior about - but that didn't stop him.

"Throw another ball, we could use some more runs!" He was yelling. "Just throw another crappy pitch and let's get on with it!" And they just kept coming.

I was scanning the opposite bleachers, looking for the despicable parent of this jerk of a kid who was taunting our already crying nine-year-old pitcher. Not one adult said anything to this kid. I was disgusted.

I figure there are three possibilities as to why this kid's parents did nothing about their child's behavior.

A) They weren't there. (Shame on them.)

B) They saw nothing wrong with his behavior. (Shame on them again.)

or C) They didn't want to embarrass their kid or themselves by taking any sort of discipline action in front of the crowd. (So it's ok for their kid to humiliate another player, but not for them or their child to suffer any embarrassment? Right.)

If Cameron had done something like that, I would have yanked his ass out of that game, dragging him off the base by the ear for everyone to see, and he would not have gone back in, even if it were going to cost his team a win. No kid of mine is going to belittle another child, especially one who is already perfectly aware of his own shortcomings.

My blood was boiling.

Of course, our turn to bat came around once again, and this same horrible kid with idiot parents was covering third base. Our kids had no chance at hitting a ball thrown by their pitcher, but this kid just couldn't stop himself from taunting the batters anyhow.

"Swing and miss! Swing at everything! You're going to miss it!" And he waited to shout all this crap until the pitcher had just released the ball, in hopes that the shouts would startle the batter and make him lose his focus.

It was so bad that I could actually see myself rushing the field and slapping this kid across the face and not feeling out of line at all. I probably would have received applause from every intelligent person at the park. These are nine-year-old kids. Maybe taunting and heckling is acceptable behavior for a high school game, but this is little league. We were loosing by something like ten runs; we hadn't even scored.

Andrew got agitated enough to yell, "Hey, third base! How about you shut your mouth!"

If you think that stopped him, you're wrong.

Can you just imagine what kind of parents this kid has? Think about it. What kind of lessons are they teaching that mongrel?

Our teams are facing off again on the 27th of May, and you can bet your life that I will not sit idly again. If we have to listen to this kid harass our children, then he can listen to me telling him exactly what I think of him and his baseball skills.

I need a Valium.