From The Sports Desk

[Sancho]

Sounds like something I’d like. Now that I’ve given up on print and switched to reading on a kindle, it should be easy to find. Hey! That gives me an idea for a book. It’ll be about my first-year experience in Little League as a player. It will be entitled Riding The Bench; the adventures of a kid with the cleanest uniform in the league. The title makes it sound like a memoir by a guy who was lousy at baseball, but actually it’ll be a memoir by a guy who was lousy at baseball.

[bounty]

if you are a good embellisher, maybe you can be the Patrick McManus of little league?

I don't remember if I even batted my first year in little league, but if I did, I didn't get any hits. the next year I only got two hits and I remember detouring on my way to first base to pick up my batting helmet that had fallen off. my third year I was tearing the place up and how I didn't make the all-stars is a mystery that fortunately doesn't keep me up at night.

I watched a few minutes of the orioles-braves game today and the orioles have a relief pitcher who is 6'8" and 280lbs!

[Sancho]

Oh hey, I can embellish like any other natural-born liar.

Chapter I: in which our hero gets a splinter in a most unfortunate place.

[Sancho]

Chapter II: At Bat - How to not hit a dinger

[Sancho]

Chapter III - Trey Naught — Season One Batting Average, point zero-zero-zero

[Sancho]

Chapter IV: The Art of Fielding — when a fly ball is headed your way, it’s best to hold back in case one of the other outfielders wants to catch it, also it helps to yell “yours” before the ball reaches apex

[bounty]

chapter IV the most entertaining so far.

I watched a bit of little league yesterday. I was in the village and ran into one of my neighbors son, so I felt obliged to stay a bit. it was torturous. in the game that was going on while I was waiting to watch my neighbor---passed balls galore, wild pitches galore---I don't think the catcher caught anything. and to make it worse, he would walk after the ball instead of hustling. the pitcher, supposedly in an attempt to help, would star walking towards home plate---and even then a significant amount of times he didn't catch the throw from the catcher.

finally---my neighbor kid's game starts. he's 8th in the line-up, but the first inning took a half hour (see the aforementioned wild pitches and passed balls) and I didn't want to wait another half hour to see if he got up to bat.

[Sancho]

Found myself at my nephew’s T-Ball game on Saturday. It was clear to me that the kids would have preferred to be elsewhere. I think they were all just humoring their dads. Nephew was playing 2nd. He didn’t notice the first two grounders that rolled by him, but he did manage to throw his glove at the third.

Chapter V: Coaching 3rd — Not sure what it’s all about, but us bench warmers get sent to coach 3rd a lot. A good technique is to point to home with one hand and pinwheel your other arm as fast as you can whenever a runner headed your way.

[bounty]

would be interesting to see how many kids make the transition from t-ball, through to rest of the levels ending in high school, and what causes the dropout.

good thinking for your nephew. seems like I heard or even saw a story once about a fielder throwing his glove at a liner and then being able to catch it after the glove intercepted its trajectory.

by the way, I recently caught a couple minutes of professional wiffle ball on tv---it was indeed amazing what the pitchers could do with the ball.

[tailor STATELY]

Hmmm... I wonder how many home runs have been stifled by a player throwing a mitt high in the air on what might have been a sure homerun ? Googled for the answer: https://baseballrulesacademy.com/els...ow-glove-ball/ ... and now I know

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[Sancho]

There it is. Thrown gloves and mitts are probably a little more common in the lesser leagues. In a related question, I wonder how many home run or foul balls get caught by a fan in a beer cup.

https://youtu.be/kxCEpfTSfJU

Go M’s

I don’t remember having T-ball when I was a kid. We started with Little League. A lot of kids dropped out after Little League. Almost all of those who made the transition to Pony League stuck with it through High School. I’m not sure why kids bail on baseball, but I suspect it’s either because there’s not enough action in baseball for a kid or there’s too much pressure for a kid. I mean, for a Little League outfielder, he waits and waits and waits and then the ball finally comes his way and then everybody in the park is looking at him.

A possible third reason is the reason I quit baseball as a kid — the coach was a jerk. He seemed to be in competition with the other coaches and just yelled at us kids. I switched to competitive swimming. The swim coaches were a husband and wife team and they were awesome. I still keep in touch with them. Also the swim team had girls. Woo-woo!

Chapter VI: How to deal with an over caffeinated coach — Hey Coach, is that other coach a friend of yours? Because those guys are killing us! Oh man! Those other guys really know what they’re doing, eh Coach?

[bounty]

there wasn't t-ball when i was a kid either. it came some years later.

i have a scan of an old newspaper article that has all the little league teams and the rosters from when i was in 6th grade. there were ~168 players on 14 teams. but by the time you get to high school, that whittles down to one team with maybe 16-20 players. some of its just plain attrition due to lack of opportunity, or getting cut.

that said, there are studies out there tracking loss of participation. in general the main reason for drop out is often "lack of fun."

I cant remember the fellows name, or for that matter now the team he played for, but I caught a few minutes of a game last week where the pitcher was a side arm thrower. he was fun to watch.

i'll probably ride into the village for a little bit Saturday afternoon to take in the baseball sights.

[Sancho]

Been a rough year for the ponies. So I dug up this one from one of my favorite writers.

This is from Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 article in Scanlan’s Monthly — The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

The race itself was only two minutes long, and even from our super-status seats and using 12-power glasses, there was no way to see what was really happening. Later, watching a TV rerun in the press box, we saw what happened to our horses. Holy Land, Ralph’s choice, stumbled and lost his jockey in the final turn. Mine, Silent Screen, had the lead coming into the stretch, but faded to fifth at the finish. The winner was a 16-1 shot named Dust Commander.

So that was the race, but Hunter Thompson (the journalist) and Ralph Steadman (a British Illustrator) had gone to the Derby to crowd-watch more than to horse-watch. Thompson had grown up in Louisville and been to The Derby many times, but it was Steadman’s first:

He had done a few good sketches, but so far we hadn’t seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for the lead drawing. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry—a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk in breeding two fast horses who are both a little crazy. The offspring will likely be very fast and also very crazy. So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Southern society where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient—to the parents—than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons and in their own ways.

[Danik 2016]

"But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Southern society where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient—to the parents—than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons and in their own ways."
Lol!

[bounty]

I haven't read it but im only 10ish days away from experiencing the live tv version of Dancing on the Pedals: The Found Poetry Of Phil Liggett, The Voice Of Cycling when the tour de france starts! he's fantastic, and the tour is the yearly highlight of my sports watching on the telly.