No. of Recommendations: 7
Baseball
I started taking my oldest son, Flash, to the ballpark when he was 1. We lived a couple miles from a Single-A team and so, when the weather was good and his nap schedule allowed, I’d throw him in the backpack and take him to a game. In those early years what he liked most about baseball was the permission to stomp and clap and make a lot of noise. We would show up somewhere around the third inning and then leave when he got bored.¹ Sometimes we’d be there for an hour. Sometimes we’d be there for ten minutes.
When he was 4, we stayed to the end of a game for the first time. As the players left the field, Flash was confused. “Baseball is over?” he asked plaintively. I was confused, too, until I realized that from his perspective, baseball was like the ocean: It was always there. We’d show up for games and baseball was happening. We’d leave games and baseball was happening. It had never occurred to him that baseball was a finite event. A thing with a beginning and an end.
I think about that a lot these days.
When Flash was 5, we started playing catch in the front yard.
By the time he was 6, I suspected that his arm was special. He threw the ball exceptionally hard for a small child. The only thing he wanted in life was to play baseball, so we spent hours in the yard, playing catch, every day.
In 2016, he discovered Major League Baseball. Prior to that summer, Flash only knew of baseball as a thing we saw in person. When I revealed that there were levels above our humble Single-A team and that we could watch these Big League clubs on TV, anytime we wanted, he was gobsmacked.
This was the season the Cubs broke the curse and won their first World Series in a century. We watched every pitch of those playoffs together. I’ll never forget Game 7. There was a rain delay and he had fallen asleep. My wife and I woke him when the game resumed. The three of us watched the denouement on an iPad, sprawled across the floor in his bedroom. When Anthony Rizzo caught the final out and stepped on the bag at first, my little boy believed in magic.
It was the happiest I had ever seen him.
I resisted letting Flash play organized ball for a long while.² When he turned 10 I gave in. He landed in our town’s Little League scene like Athena emerging fully-formed from Zeus’s head. In three years of Little League he gave up zero (0) hits. By age 11 he had been pulled onto a travel team. By 12 he was spending so much time at the local indoor facility, where our Single-A team practiced in the off-season, that he knew more adults who were professional baseball players than he knew lawyers.³ To Flash, becoming a ballplayer was just another normal career path. Some people became teachers. Some people went to med school. Some people got picked in the MLB draft.
High school was a challenge for Flash. The school he played for as a freshman wasn’t a good fit. Then he tore his UCL, had surgery, and spent eighteen months rehabbing. He transferred. The new school was a better fit spiritually and academically, but didn’t have a baseball program. So he trained on his own, and played the summer showcase circuits. Two months ago he finished the college-recruiting process and signed with a school he admires. A year from now he’ll be living on campus, playing at the next level.
Flash is older now and has experienced adversity. He no longer believes in magic. He knows that getting picked in the MLB draft is not something that just happens. He understands that baseball will make those decisions for him and that his goal for the next four years is simply to work hard, learn everything he can, and grow into the man he wants to be.
Also, he sees that baseball isn’t the most important thing in life.
Last week a student at the college he’ll be attending was arrested by ICE and disappeared into the system. This is the world into which I am sending my son.
Jonathan Last
