Ah, yes, youth baseball tournament season in Minnesota.
Time to showcase the purity and pageantry of the grand old game and sweat out the clash of friendly competition and grievance culture.
Time for 12-year-old boys to flash their drip, bemoan strike zones and fly too close to the sun of overheated expectations.
Time for parents to circle the Gatorade wagons, anchor those canopies and channel their inner Karen for a long, hot weekend of passive aggressively plotting to murder complete strangers.
A time for laughs, a time for tears.
And equal time for joy and dread.
Here’s the thing about being an amateur sports parent — it makes you feel, say and do things you don’t want to. An endless loop of behavioral shame that will leave you weeping for humanity — if not for yourself.
None of which is in the user manual they hand you in the delivery room.
There is no greater pride than seeing your child succeed on the field. No greater empathy than shepherding them through failure. And no greater angst than bearing witness to them being screwed.
I was deep-fried in all these chaotic emotions this year during the forced integration of travel baseball.
Just another adult rite of passage. Like graduation, marriage and bringing a crying baby onto a perfectly quiet airplane. Or taking drugs, which I highly recommend for anyone attending one of these tournaments.
It is exhausting to suppress simmering rage when watching grown men and women detach from reality and devolve into outtakes from “Jersey Shore.”
When decorum crumbles and educated adults turn a teenage umpire into the devil.
Cheers morph into verbal gamesmanship between fan bases.
And coaching strategy hinges on a motion to dismiss.
My son is competing for a state championship this weekend. His team received an at-large invitation to be the 40th seed in a 40-team tournament.
A one-way ticket into a stump grinder. Or redemption. Either way, he’s 12. Life will go on. For all of us.
Delayed due process is better than none at all, I suppose. Our boys initially were nitpicked into forfeiting a qualifying game last month because our starter exceeded the pitch-count limit — by one measly pitch.
You have to hand it to these suburban coaching wonks. They did not point out the discrepancy when our guy threw ball one to a hitter with nobody on base and was quickly pulled in favor of a reliever.
No, these Perry Masonites waited two innings to raise their objection and make their technical argument to incredulous tournament officials. How convenient after falling behind 14-3 in the fourth inning.
Mind you, this team had already qualified for the state tournament. We actually needed the victory to get in.
Never mind that their players all wanted to keep playing. As did one assistant coach. None of them were eager to out-lawyer an opponent for the win.
But not this head coach. Rules are rules when you’re a latter-day Leo Durocher stockpiling trophies for the man cave. That Pyrrhic victory left our kids boiling in resentments as our coaches served them a steaming pile of life-is-unfair lessons.
There was dramatic gesturing and caustic sniping between our parents and theirs, turning this pleasant Sunday morning into hell with the lid off.
Kids on both teams were treated to the familial fiasco. It was painful to witness. I finally understand primal scream therapy.
The only thing preventing me from joining the verbal brawl was how embarrassing it had already become. How skin-crawlingly uncomfortable it is to see adults childishly lose their minds over a child’s game.
The rest of this 95-degree afternoon was spent gluing back together the shattered egos of our middle-schoolers, avoiding eye contact with anyone in opposing colors and trying to stay out of jail.
Our head coach chronicled the whole sorry episode in a dispassionate letter to state baseball officials, creating a record for all to assess. The plea bargaining leveraged an at-large bid.
There is a chance this weekend that our kids get a rematch with our litigious adversaries. Poetic justice demands it, but I’m no romantic for this kind of vengeance.
I have neither the time nor the bandwidth these days to endure another two-hour gong show and wind up in a viral video.
I really hope we win it all. Just not at all costs.
Not sure I can afford bail.
