By the end, cute is riding the bench

In April, the Little League season stretched out ahead of Will Kramer (left) and a Cubs teammate. (John Bohn/Globe Staff/File)

Little League started out cute. The magnificent opening scene warranted the label, with uniformed wee ones bapping singles that devolved into homers, swarming every grounder, emulating our national superstars. After his first T-ball game, our son Will declared that thenceforth he preferred to be addressed exclusively as "Movaughn." My wife and I kept on hollering "Run, Will, run!" His pint-sized Dodgers cap is still kicking around the house, six years later.

Little League's mission statement promises "to develop superior citizens rather than superior athletes." That distinction shapes skill-blind policies at the start. In our Newton West Little League, coaches scheduled equal playing time for each kid, and, with astonishing patience, improved everyone's throwing, catching, and batting. They advised the whole team on the tougher skills: staying in front of a grounder, keeping the head in while batting, even where to throw the ball when. As Will climbed through the next two levels of play in subsequent years, democracy still reigned. Team members remained equal citizens.

"Cuteness," according to a celebrated 1992 Daniel Harris article by that name, "is an attribute of the helpless." As those cute and helpless T-ballers evolved by dint of grit and repetition, what Harris terms "suppressed emotional volatility" surfaced. Games came to include expressions of shame, mutters of unfairness, and celebratory gloats, all tamed by coaches' admonitions to "flush it" when frustrated, and to "show a little class" when victorious.

In this, Will's final Little League summer, adult sweat and whassup attitudes have arrived. Cuteness fled back to the starting line for new recruits. Will now trails a lengthening statistical record quantifying his relative baseball greatness. He's part of a sea-to-shining-sea screening process shearing away most everyone while drawing a few lucky winners straight toward glory. Baseball player must be among the most screened-for American professions.

Consulting clipboards, coaches recruit the most skilled 11s and 12s for the ever-more-refined Majors squads, then for summer travel and for all-star teams. At this level, coaches finally set about winning, favoring the strongest of these strong players, and benching the others as much as the regulations permit. The "Run, Will, run!" we'd shouted back when he had skidded gleefully around the T-ball diamond became accompanied by frustration on his face whenever one of his sharp grounders was fielded and whipped across to first ahead of him. Running his fastest was often not fast enough.

I helped coach the Cubs squad this season, as winners and losers emerged within the league's teams as well as among them. We helped kids learn to deal with failure even as we stage-managed it, respectively framing for those players benched, striking out, or flubbing grounders that sitting helps our team, that baseball's best hitters fail seven-tenths of the time, and that we all have off days so let it go.

The superstars sometimes looked like three-quarter-sized professionals. A superb few fielded liners while horizontal, fired relentless shutouts, whacked homers. You could see, in the faces of the younger kids lining the fences to watch these games as school ended and summer began, that these guys were nearly what T-ball newbies pretended to be, made flesh mythical yet walking among us. Being a superior athlete had became an expression of citizenship, wrapped in team and town and league loyalties, encouraged by our collegial respect.

And right after the Cubs' season ended, Newton West's all-star team - including Will - played in a district tournament. Two losses and a team's gone; the winner climbs through ever-larger catchment areas toward the apex, the internationally televised Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa.

Awesome had replaced cute. The Cubs' manager, Bob Joyce, ran the Newton West all-star team too, in long daily practices. He seemed, out of respect for the players' earnestness and skill, to instruct more consultatively than he had.

We tried hard, played good ball, but lost our first district game; it might have gone the other way but for an unexploited meatball pitch or two.

We won the next game, which also could have headed the other way until we lighted it up in the top of the final inning and batted around, plus a few. Our star, Bob's son Alex, belted two homers, the first clobbering a neighbor's roof. We scored 10 runs. Alex often looks dead serious, always hustling, always on, playing through each practice as though a game were on the line. For this game, rounding third for the second time in the top of the sixth, he allowed himself a broad grin.

In the next game, when our ace pitcher, Tommy Bishop, reached his 85-pitch limit with just a few outs to go, we led by a run. Our opponents had a man on first. Alex came in to pitch. I felt relief - Alex was so reliable. But at this level, so were opposing batters. The bases loaded up. A bloop single, one of those small hits that a few feet east or west would have been an easy out, ended our transit of Little League.

Looking back, the team's victories along the way had seemed like heedless fun. The final defeat felt serious at the moment. Alex's expression after his last pitch carried some grown-up heartache. Little League ended, for Alex and for Will, with the dawning of big-league awareness.

Baseball serves up protracted frustration and unthinkable failure. It is, finally, an adult game, safely evincing the most trying of human emotions. The game stayed on Will's mind for a few days - lost dreams of Williamsport, no more team, no more Little League. Then he asked, "Dad, when does Newton Senior Youth Baseball start?" Not such a cute name. Life begins at 13.

Mark Kramer chronicled his season as a coach with the Newton West Little League Cubs. He can be reached at kramernarrative@gmail.com.