Reified and Refined

jackflaps:

Because mightyflynn, brian-k, and drew-f did it first, here’s my old Ottawa American Little League fields from my early-’90s glory days. 

This is a really cool idea. So, my hometown is a huge baseball town. Like, our teams regularly went to state and regional competitions from grade school on up through high school and Legion ball. We even hosted the Cal Ripken / Babe Ruth World Series (which is a Little League alternative) a couple of times. My neighbor as a kid had his own batting cage built in an old chicken coop, and ended up in AA ball with the Giants. Another neighbor ended up writing books about growing up playing baseball in Mattoon.

While it was kinda cool in some ways, I have real mixed feelings about all of this, because the situation made my experience of baseball as a kid a lot shittier and less fun than it needed to be.

The first fields I played on in 2nd-4th grade Jaycee League are all gone now. They were the crappy dirt and rock fields at the neighborhood elementary schools, which have now been replaced by two big centralized ones. The fields were also replaced by this monstrosity, which for an economically depressed town of 20,000, should give you an idea of how baseball-crazy Mattoon really is. I played outfield and a bit of first for a perennial contender, and don’t remember much, other than that in retrospect shit was way too intense for a 2nd-4th grade baseball league.

The field from 5th-6th grade(first pic) is the one that went on to host the World Series. It wasn’t quite this nice then, but it was still pretty damn great. 5th grade I was on one of the best teams in the league, and played all 3 outfield slots and 2nd, usually batting 8th or 9th. I was too scrawny to really hit, but I could catch the ball, draw a walk, and run fast, so I wasn’t totally useless. 6th grade I talked my dad into coaching, and we drafted a bunch of my friends. We were awful, but had a lot of fun. Because of said awfulness, I got to pitch and play short. I was ok at the latter, but hilarious at the former. It was a 45-foot mound and I had grown a bit in the past year, so I threw hard enough, but my control was ludicrous. In my best game I threw a 1-hitter and struck out a ton of guys, but still lost, because I walked like 8 and hit a couple in 6 innings.

In 7th grade we moved over to the the full-sized field at Peterson Park(2nd pic). I got kinda serious about baseball these two years, going to summer camps up at the U of I and hitting a lot in the cages year round. I got quite a bit better too as on the big field I learned to hit the ball in the gaps and run forever, or chop it to the left side of the infield and beat it out about half the time against kids without enough arm to be playing at 90 feet. I still didn’t have any power, and was shall we say, erratic with my throwing. I pitched some (badly), but mostly played short, 2nd, or center and batted leadoff or 2nd.

It was kind of the same deal, 1 miserable-ish year on the “good” team, coached by caricutures of asshole Little League Dads, and one really fun year on the Bad News Bears style team who didn’t give a fuck. Only, this time around we won, as a decent amount of talent was starting to get alienated enough by the hardass culture to want to play on the “fun” team, and I went on a crazy streak and finished 2nd or 3rd the league in hitting that year.

Even then, I still just barely made the traveling tournament team and was only used as a pinch-runner. A couple of other friends who tore up the league that year playing for the less “serious” teams also got frozen out, and this kinda clued me in to How Things Worked in this town, baseball-wise. This wasn’t a meritocracy; you had to be part of the asshole Little League Dads crowd and play their game if you wanted any shot at the Show.

So, as we got older and the player pool was winnowed down and things got ever more intense and competitive, I gradually lost interest. I tried out once or twice but never really sniffed making the school teams. There was no youth league outside of school beyond junior high, so aside from one really fun barnstorming team full of stoners and goofballs that served as preseason cannon fodder for local Legion teams (which was my one opportunity to see, er hear a 90+ MPH fastball from a batter’s box) my baseball career was done at age 14.

Too bad, as it would have been fun to play on through high school, but if I could have made the team at all (probably not), I knew I didn’t want to deal with the high-pressure dickhead culture around baseball anymore. So, I concentrated on soccer as my high school sport, and happily ran track or played club soccer for my Spring semesters.