The Little Team Nobody Would Take

The sign-up table

That Saturday was cold and bright, the kind of late March morning where the frost is still on the outfield grass but the sun means it.

Bob put on his navy windbreaker and the faded red ball cap he has worn so long the bill is soft as a dish rag.

I went with him. I would not have missed it. We drove past the grain elevator and turned in at the park, and the gravel crunched under the tires, and there were maybe a dozen parents standing around the shelter house with coffee in paper cups.

Craig was sitting at the sign-up table with a cash box and a clipboard and a stack of forms.

He saw his father get out of the truck and his face went still, the same way it did at dinner. Etta was beside him with Homer on her lap.

Bob walked up to the table. A couple of the dads said “Morning, Coach,” and Bob nodded to each of them.

Then he picked up the coach volunteer form from the end of the table and a pen from the cup.

“Dad,” Craig said, low. “What are you doing.”

“Signing up,” Bob said. He was already writing his name. He has the neatest handwriting of any man I know, from forty years of reading addresses off envelopes.

Craig leaned over and saw which box his father had checked. He sat back. “Dad, that’s T-ball. They’re five. Some of them don’t know which way first base is.”

“I know how old they are,” Bob said. He kept writing. “Notice says you need somebody by April first.”

The parents around the table had gone quiet. One of the young mothers was holding a form against her chest and staring at Bob like he had just walked out of the sky.

Craig looked at the form a long time. I could see him working on what to say.

He could not say no. He could not say no without saying why, and he could not say why in front of a dozen parents and his own wife and his father.

So he took the form, and he read it over, and he signed his name on the line at the bottom where the president signs.

“You’ll have to redo the background check,” Craig said. “And the state training. The concussion one and the heart one.”

“I’ve done them every year,” Bob said.

That was true. Ohio makes every youth coach watch a video on sudden cardiac arrest, what to look for and where the defibrillator is kept.

Bob had watched it every spring since the law came in. I thought about him watching it again this year, with his stent, and I had to look away at the elevator.

The young mother with the form against her chest came over to us before we had even reached the truck.

Her name was Flossie and she had twin boys, and she told Bob she had been praying somebody would take it because her boys had talked about T-ball since Christmas.

“Well,” Bob said, “somebody has.”

The first night

The first practice was a Tuesday, the fourteenth of April, at half past six on the small diamond behind the grain elevator.

The big diamond sat just past it across a strip of grass, and Tyler had the twelves out there the same evening from five thirty to seven.

Bob had me drive separately so I could sit. I brought my lawn chair and a thermos of coffee and a blanket for my legs, because April in western Ohio does not promise anything once the sun starts down.

We got there at six fifteen. I thought we would be early. We were not.

When we came around the side of the concession stand, there were fourteen little ones waiting at the backstop with their gloves.

Fourteen. Some had their gloves on the wrong hand. One little girl, who I learned was named Hazel, had hers on her foot and was trying to walk in it.

Their parents stood behind them in a loose line with phones and car keys and toddlers on their hips.

Bob stopped at the end of the backstop and looked at them. They looked back at him.

Fourteen faces turned up like flowers toward a window. Not one of them had any idea who this old man in the red cap was.