The Ugly Details

Okay, I guess I will tell you the ugly details of my horrible Saturday although it pains me to do so. :) We'll just call this my public confessional. First you have to have a little back story on fall ball. Fall ball, unlike spring ball which is hard core, is mainly for the purpose of training and development. There isn't a draft, there's not a lot of practice and you can either get on a team that is totally stacked or one where a lot of the kids have hardly played before. Often times the teams are terribly unbalanced. Aaron never seems to have a problem, but Chad always gets on these teams that rarely if ever win. He didn't want to do fall ball this year. He really wanted to play club ball with all of his friends, but that was impossible because of all the Sunday play. So, we didn't exactly go into it with a good attitude. But, we were hoping for the best. Chad's team is pretty good at hitting, but the fielding errors were awful. And instead of just smiling and letting it go, I sat in the stands sighing, rolling my eyes and seething. Then Chad got up to pitch and he clearly had not quite recovered from his shoulder injury of spring season. He walked a couple of people and then, realizing that he didn't have great control of his arm, just lobbed a ball in to make sure it was at least in the strike zone. Unfortunately, he was pitching to a 16 year old who is on his high school's varsity team and he hit a grand slam. Chad has never had anyone hit a home run off of him before. (He said later, "Doesn't some varsity guy have something better to do than play fall ball and make younger kids feel like crap?") So, he was crying, I was feeling awful and everything was going wrong. Chad recovered from the trauma much sooner than I did however and I was in a terrible mood for the rest of the day. I even told the boys that that they needed to spend the rest of the day practicing and I might have even have told them they needed to (gasp) rise above mediocrity. I know. I know. I am a terrible person. Baseball turns me into Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. Come to think of it, this story may not surprise my former roommates out there as they have seen Mr. Hyde in the past. Alas! I felt terrible the next morning and promised the boys I would go to Crazy Ladies Anonymous, but Aaron pointed out that that would be impossible because then I would have to hang out with Psycho Neighbor and Helicopter Mom. Guess I'll just have to self medicate before games.