The Little Team Nobody Would Take

The drift

It started with Stanley.

Stanley Schmitz was twelve that spring, a tall skinny boy with a cowlick, and he had played for Bob the spring before, at eleven, his first year on the twelves.

He was on Tyler’s team now, his last year before junior high ball. One Tuesday in early May, Tyler’s practice let out at seven, and Stanley did not get in his mother’s car.

He walked across the strip of grass to the small diamond with his glove under his arm.

He stood at the end of our backstop for a minute like he was not sure he was allowed. Then Bob looked up and saw him.

“Stanley,” Bob said, the way he used to say it, once and quiet. “Get out there behind second and shag for these little ones. They can’t throw it back to the tee, it’s taking all night.”

Stanley grinned like he had been given a medal, and he trotted out behind second base, and for the next half hour he chased down every dribbler and every pop-up and carried them back to the tee in his glove like eggs.

The little ones thought he was a giant. Hazel followed him everywhere.

The next week Stanley brought Royce. The week after that it was Stanley and Royce and Noah and a boy named Isaac who had a fastball that scared the other twelves.

All of them had played for Bob the spring before. All of them walked over at seven when Tyler blew the whistle, and stayed until the light went long.

The big boys taught the little ones to run through first base and not stop on it. They played catch with them, soft and patient, underhanded from five feet away.

They tied shoes when Bob was busy. I watched a twelve-year-old boy kneel down and tie a five-year-old’s sneaker and pat the toe, just exactly the way Bob did it.

By June it was half of Tyler’s team.

I want to be careful here, because Tyler Dorn did not do anything wrong except say yes to a job he did not know how to do. He was not mean to those boys.

He just did not know how to coach. He ran long drills where everybody stood in a line, and he gave little speeches about attitude, and the boys got bored.

Some evenings that June he could not fill his own practice. Boys started showing up at six instead of five thirty, then skipping Thursdays, and parents started bringing them straight to the small diamond at half past six because that was where their boys wanted to be.

I remember one Thursday when I looked across at the big diamond and Tyler was standing out by second base with five boys. Five.

You cannot run an infield drill with five. He had a bucket of balls at his feet and his hands on his hips and he looked lost.

And Craig was standing next to him. Craig, with his clipboard and his president’s whistle around his neck, looking at those five boys, and then looking across the grass at the small diamond where his father was down on one knee with a ring of children around him.

Nobody said a word to Craig about it. Not one parent. They did not have to.

Everybody in that park could see where the boys were, and everybody in that park knew whose they had been.

I watched my son watch his father, and I will tell you the truth: I did not feel good about it.

I thought I would. Some low part of me had wanted him to stand there and see it.

But when he did, all I felt was sorry for him, standing out there in the grass with five boys and a whistle, too proud to walk a hundred and fifty feet.