The 2011 version of the Red Sox began with question marks: several key members gone and lots of new and untested faces...how good will they be? Please don't misunderstand: one of our goals as parents is to have our kids participate in whatever they find interestig. We try not to be psychos about it. But when it's baseball, and your child's love of it almost equals your love of watching him play it, you just want them to do well. To have fun. And it's really only fun when you're winning.
So the Sox started out slowly. The inequity in the league was really startling: a two teams who could wallop all comers, and at least two that were walloped by all comers. We were somewhere in the middle. But they tried. As always, Coach B was a wonder of enthusiasm, encouragement and realism, and were assistant coaches Ernest, Greg and Matt (so cute! AHEM!). By the end of the season, they were on a roll: the last two games of the regular season came as confident wins, and we were off to the playoffs, which were just spectacular.
Game one, against the A's, ,we came out on top, 5-2, although seeded lower. The A's had beaten us earlier in the season, during the fabled "40° Game" (which is interchangeable with every other 40° game we played this spring), and those kinds of wins are always sweet.
Before I go on to Game 2, I'll just invite you to view the joy of watching your firstborn male child snag a ball as first baseman. Go ahead. Take it all in. Noticing, though not commenting on, the gray smudge on the right margin that is, in fact, the chain link fence.
For Game 2 we faced the Pirates, the seriously butt-kicking squad who had gone undefeated all season...at their first meeting, the Pirates handily dealt us a nice 11-4 defeat, and my child in particular was utterly crushed by it. On the tails of our Game 1 win, we were hopeful, but never could have anticipated the magic the Sox would perform: we were toe-to-toe, outpitching and outhitting them, and by 3 innings, we were ahead 3-2. Our number two pitcher had a nightmare game, and after hitting 3 batters in one inning, had to be removed (he hadn't hit a batter all season, and was just destroyed)...before I can blink, out trots my Ty to finish the inning...I was physically sick for him.
My prayer was that he wouldn't implode. What he did was strike out their best two batters and ended that inning like nobody's bidness, stranding two runners on base. They brought him out later to close out that game in the 5th; by that point they had scored two to tie, and although he did all he could, including hitting well and getting on base due to walks, we had a few errors in the field and at home, and they eked out a win 6-4.
As parents, the whole lot of us were just stupefied: not that they had managed to lose, but that they had managed to come so close. We were ecstatic for their effort, and although the boys cried, the coach cried for another reason: he'd never been so proud of a group of boys, ever. I cried for one boy in particular.
They went on to win Game 14-8, pulling another win over an opponent who whipped us solidly earlier in the season, and it was particularly enjoyable to watch their jerk of a coach lose his composure so completely. I can say that after a week has gone by. At the time, I couldn't think of enough words to call him.
So we ended the season in 3rd place. At our end-of-season pizza party at Anthony's, Coach B gave a small speech acknowledging the strengths of each player, and his assessment of Ty was spot on: no one works harder to get better than this kid. No one else takes the game this seriously. Nobody else puts forth the kind of effort he does. For me, the best part of watching Ty pitch is how he went out when he really didn't want to, when he felt like he was the weakest member of the pitching staff, when he could have crumbled and chose to go out and give it everything he could. This is what we want him to remember: you work. You try. It isn't easy or pretty, and it doesn't always work out the way you'd like. But it always works out. One way or another.
No comments:
Post a Comment