The Little Team Nobody Would Take

He walked out to home plate and got down on one knee in the dirt. I heard his knee pop from my lawn chair.

He did not wince. He just got down at their level, so his face was even with theirs, and he smiled.

“My name is Coach Bob,” he said. “I’m going to learn every one of your names tonight, and you are going to learn three things. Glove. Ball. Base. That’s it. That’s the whole game.”

A little boy in the front row raised his hand. “What about hitting?”

“Hitting is the fun part,” Bob said. “You get to do the fun part every single time. Everybody hits. Nobody sits.”

That was the moment I watched the parents relax. You could see it go down the line like a breeze across a bean field. Shoulders dropped.

One father laughed out loud. They had brought their babies to the park not knowing if this would be a disaster, and now they knew it would not.

He learned every name that night, just like he said. Hazel and Irwin and the twins, Caleb and Burl. Lily and Nell and a big serious boy named Henry.

Avery and Ella and Ervin and Zeke and Emma and Jack and a tiny redheaded girl named Claire who did not say one word all evening.

And he tied shoes. Lord, the shoes. Five-year-olds come untied every two minutes. I sat there and counted.

In one hour that man got down on one knee and tied shoes nineteen times, double knots every time, and never once asked a parent to do it.

“Foot up on my knee,” he would say, and the little one would put a sneaker on his khakis, and he would tie it and pat the toe and say “Now you’re fast.”

And the child would run off faster, I swear, just because Coach Bob had said so.

When it was over and the parents were loading kids into minivans and pickups, Bob stood at the backstop and picked dirt out of his knee. I folded my chair and walked over to him.

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” he said. He was smiling in a way I had not seen since before October. “That Hazel’s going to be trouble.”