The Boys of Summer

It’s not the Amalfi Coast, but the view from my tiny home office upstairs is sweet …. I see a rusty red wheelbarrow, standing upright, serving as part strike zone/part catcher for my son’s baseball games. These aren’t games really. Every game is part of a “season” and every season has winners and losers and, if you ask the players — Andy, Arnie, Dave or Kyle — every game is life and death. There are arguments on almost every play and rules even Derek Jeter may not understand and, more often than not, these elementary age baseball players will storm off, the recipient of a bad call or losing effort. The kids are genius really: each half inning is one out, ghost runners can’t advance more than a base, unless a ball is hit over the deck for a home run, and typically games are finished inside 40 minutes. MLB should stop by to consider this model.

My cost: grass. As the kids have gotten taller since the first season in 2007, the small speck of dirt that represented the pitcher’s mound here has widened like a balloon. The field today is a true sand lot and sometimes I’m pretty sure the boys like it better than the actual little league games they play with real uniforms and stressed out parents.

The beauty of these games is we don’t have to interfere – the kids make the rules, the decisions, and they settle their own arguments. On Saturday, young Andy was using the art of baseball chatter to get under Kyle’s skin. It worked, and Kyle ultimately stormed off – only this time he took the wheelbarrow with him. I had let his dad borrow it that week and Kyle assumed it was theirs. But the others carried on, devising a new 1 on 1 game. Kyle returned the next day, with the wheelbarrow, his glove, and no memory of the night before.