We squeezed in a morning practice at the start of the Newton West Little League's Memorial Day weekend break. Coaches Bob Joyce, Kevin Fitzgerald and I sat with each Cub in turn on the bench beside the Hamilton Field backstop, while the rest of the team ran through some drills nearby. Hamilton is a short walk from my home. Our sons call it "the park," and they crawled, toddled, safety-swung, triked, T-balled, and now often wander to the field solo. Chatting there with Will, now 12, and his fellow Cubs, it's clear just how insistently independent they've grown.
Right at the start of my season as an assistant Cubs coach, I'd seen that Little League helps kids feel safe enough to try hard. After our bench talks with the kids, I want to take that idea further: Little League vests kids with the experience of grace.
Theologically, grace is a big idea, implying divinely vested opportunity for mere mortals, deserving or not, to advance spiritually.
Here at the park, the secular sense of the metaphor fits adult efforts to empower the play of hundreds of kids, season after season. And on the kids' side, they work hard at better-than-grown-up standards of sportsmanship, positive thinking, sacrifice, mindfulness, restraint of temper, mutual encouragement, learning from failure, and plugging away at physical skills too hard to perfect.
The adults and kids build a collaborative zone for play - not the formless scampering the kids take up as they arrive early, but game-time, nearly ceremonial play, constrained and codified to the centimeter by coaches, umps, rulebooks and good deportment, kept so fair and serious it evinces competence, heroism, wild accomplishment and deep regret, a season's worth of grace per player. Many examples emerge as we chat, on the Hamilton backstop bench, with each Cub in turn at midseason.
We've got a situation to repair together: seven losses, two wins. Along the way we'd huffed about a few game-changing moments - a dropped fly that scored two runs, a confounded third-strike call that had halted our slugger's hopes. Teams always have such explanations at hand, useless, except that they imply that any minute now, the faintest of smiles from on high might reverse bad fortune. We spend three minutes per kid urging extra effort, and realize anew what they've done already.
More often than one might reasonably expect, our 11-year-old catcher, Ethan, traps would-be passed balls, detaining opponents hoping to dash home from third base. The coaches praise Ethan's "toughness after getting banged up," his clutch hits, and "aggression on the base paths."We remind Joey how we admired his best left-field moment, trapping against his belly a fly ball that absolutely needed catching. He's also stepping toward the pitch more often and becoming a surer hitter.
We celebrate our right fielder, M.T., and his desperate concentration over the past month, through fretful try after try, drill after drill. He's finally flattened his gangly, looping swing, and has started poking grounders - and one line drive - up the middle.Our slugger and utility infielder, T-Mac, has become possessed, ranging impossibly far to his right to shag, with empowered glove, a lightening-bolt grounder. "You need the eye of the tiger," Coach Kevin says to rev him up. "Say to yourself, 'I'm going out there like a crazed dog!" So goes the transmission of grace.The coaches appreciate again our superstar and his eighth, ninth, 10th consecutive hits, many of them doubles and triples. We remind him that his play has earned him a useful power to praise teammates.We appreciate Vito's unfailing cheer and encouragement of others. He was tickled to find himself, though not fleet of foot, pinch-running for a slower kid. We tell him his good-humored self-acceptance awes and strengthens the team.Thomas, also 11 and a likely big star by next year, shows the kind of grit that dawns on one slowly, as his pitching advances through six innings, modestly, efficiently, nothing too tough, little hittable, steady even as runners pile up on base, with the result that few score.Some grace flashes by so fast, it must be appreciated by a mental replay. Take the boy known as BFitz and his casual gloving of a liner that seemingly had already passed him. As though waving at his father, he'd gloved it and then glanced at Dad, grinning.Some grace seems granted in haphazard defiance of the laws of physics, such as Liam's gawky, inspired snow-cone rescue of a fly, gathered in over the wrong shoulder, that sent him tumbling down near the center-field fence.There's risk in trying that hard. Jacob's determination ended with another long fly glancing off his glove and cracking his orbital bone. A doctor coaching T-ball a field away had hopped the fence and sent Jacob off, to long applause, ice-pack in place, for surgery.I leave it to coaches Bob and Kevin to mention my son Will's drive to do well. He takes chances and often succeeds, his quick sense of how to move overtaking his vulnerability. "You're learning to keep the glove down right out to the limit of your range," Coach Bob said. "You made that rolling dive catch over at Murphy Field!" Will, a perfectionist, responds to praise by saying he needs to hit better.Coach Kevin, big, imposing, a Newton star athlete a few decades back, teaches skills with the step-by-step insight of an engineer, and also has the grace of silliness. He supplies the team, each game, with exotic flavors of sunflower seeds - arriving at the last game with dill-pickle sunflower seeds (who knew?).Mark Kramer is chronicling his season as a coach with the Newton West Little League Cubs. He can be reached at kramernarrative@gmail.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
