“There are only 
two seasons: 
winter and baseball.” 
Bill Veeck, Jr.

It was an overcast mid-November morning in San José when Kathy and I arrived at the Evergreen campus of LeyVa Middle School for Liam’s final game of the fall baseball season today. I was a bit disappointed that everyone who showed up to enjoy watching a group of kids play baseball on a Saturday morning found the gates to the empty LeyVa parking lot closed and locked. It seems that Mr. Jim Grassi, the principal at LeyVa, is unwilling to allow Little League parents, coaches, and other fans to park in the lot on Saturday mornings, despite the fact that he, himself, had been a player in Evergreen Little League when he was a kid and that Evergreen Little League pays the school district for use of the field. Go figure.

Despite this unfortunate situation, after finding a parking spot in the neighborhood and walking quite a distance to the baseball field at the rear of the campus, I was reminded of the words of legendary baseball announcer Harry Caray, “Hello again, everybody. It’s a bee-yoo-ti-ful day for baseball!”

Most people associate baseball with spring and summer. Many would consider mid-November to be the off-season. The World Series is over. major league baseball stadiums are empty, unless they are being used for concerts or other community events. But all across America, die-hard lovers of the game of baseball are still playing “fall ball.” My grandson, Liam, is one of those kids.

Liam’s team is blessed with an excellent coaching staff, men who recognize that baseball is a game and that learning to play the game is a developmental process. They don’t expect perfection from their players. Week after week, they focus on improvement of skills and a better overall understanding of the game. They correct without criticizing. They encourage without pressuring the kids to do more than they are capable of doing at this age. They inspire and motivate the kids, helping them to understand that baseball is a game to be enjoyed, not a chore to be endured. And respect for the players and coaches of the other team is a high priority for this coaching staff.

Watching Liam, now 11-years-old, step up to the plate for an at-bat reminded me of my own experience of playing baseball in fifth grade. I did not possess the level of confidence Liam exudes on the field. When he gets up to bat, he has every expectation that he will get a hit. You can see this clearly in his posture. My at-bats were experiences of fear, mostly fear of not getting hit by a pitch, but also fear of my coach’s disapproval when I struck out. My hope as a batter was to draw a walk, because I had no confidence that I was capable of hitting the ball. Not surprisingly, Liam had more hits (two singles) in today’s game than I had in my entire fifth grade season!

In my childhood, the focus seemed to be on winning games, not developing skills for the future. We ended our fifth grade season as league champions, but none of my teammates went on to play baseball in their high school years. Liam’s coaches are far more concerned with enhancing player development than winning games at this level. 

Time will tell, but my guess is that these kids are going to enjoy playing baseball much more and for much longer than I did. Going to baseball practice and playing in games should be enjoyable. Long-time Pittsburgh Pirates’ star Willie Stargell made an excellent point when he said, “When they start the game, they don’t yell, ‘Work ball!’ They say, ‘Play ball!’”