Day 1

Day one finds me at home and out of work. I drive a school bus for a living usually and in the summer the work dries up while the bills still need paid....I have about a months worth of reserves in the bank so I'm hoping the situation changes soon. On a lighter note, the unemployment gives me some free time to get some modeling done. As anyone reading this knows, I build trains for fun. It's goofy but it gives me something to do.

On the subject of model trains I posted on Facebook this morning how I'm glad I did that in high school as my athletic abilities are.....well, lacking. My mother promptly told me that she couldn't remember any time my "abilities" had ever actually been tested. I love my mom but she has totally forgotten about the year I played little league. As my mind wandered back to that summer I thought it would be fun to share my experiences with you all.

The year was 2004 I believe. It was either 2003 or 2004....I don't know I can't remember. Whatever that's not the point. Anyway, I had a buddy in junior high school who played little league at the local baseball diamonds. There was a whole club of teams there and it was the biggest place on our side of town to play baseball. My buddy told me how awesome it was and that I should join a team and play in the league. I figured I'd give it a shot.

Now let's not beat around the bush here, my buddy was slender and athletic and had played there for the past few years. I on the other hand, was overweight and cheesy, and the only time I'd ever picked up a bat was to put it back in the hall closet. My confidence was pretty much non-existent but he convinced me that trying out was a great idea. Well "trying out" is a loose term.....basically you walked up to the guy with the hat, said, "Hey I want to play ball here", handed him 90 bucks, and you were in. It wasn't exactly a physical hurdle.

My first day at the league happened to be the opening day of the season and the team that I had been chosen for (The Cardinals) was scheduled to play that afternoon. I donned my new jersey and wandered out to meet my new teammates and coaches. I would soon regret this whole thing....

The coach looked like some doper who just walked out of a Vanilla Ice video and was still "living the glory days" from when he was in high school. He was the kind of guy you'd expect to see on the 6 o'clock news having fallen asleep in a dingy Vegas hotel room with some disease-ridden hooker, only to awake 6 hours later to find himself tits up in the bathtub with a kidney missing and cops searching his pockets for loose change. The cops would be completely surprised to discover he hadn't been dead that whole time; the only belongings in his possession being a small rectangular mirror and a fresh pack of razor blades he scored at the "Handi-mart" down the street. He was the kind of guy who sold reefer after the local high school let out for the day out of the back of a rusted out El Camino; the kind of guy who bought low quality Colombian bam-bam from his dealer behind the Snack Shack before every game. In other words, he was a winner for sure.

The coach's dad on the other hand was another story. He was twice as old as the coach and looked like a farmer lost in the "big city" of Altoona. He always had this hung-over attitude and smelled of cheap liquor and Virginia Slims. He was the kind of coach who, immediately after every game, would purposefully pretend not to know you so he could get to his truck faster. The post game talk typically went something like this...

"Well guys that game sucked. I'm not gonna lie you kids are just awful. I'm getting the hell out of here before your supreme lack of talent makes me throw up."

"Hey coach do we have practice this week?"

"Piss off, loser"

"But coach, what about the prac-.."

"I said get lost dipweed!"

"Yes sir..."

Aside from the stellar coaching staff, the team wasn't all that bad. Actually we were. In fact by the time the season was over we had racked up an incredible 19 losses only to win one game the entire season; and even that didn't count as the opposing team had to forfeit due to most of the players being sick on bad pizza from a party the night before.

We had all of 4 practices the entire season and the one time we tried to go to the batting cages as a team turned into a miserable failure as Vanilla Ice was the only coach to show up and his dad was the one with the key. I guess being passed out drunk on the couch was more important than further poisoning the minds of America's budding youth that day...whatever.

I always felt bad for the other teams because our batting average was like a .000 or something. The outfield was a ghost town with kids literally napping in their little outfield dirt holes. The 'clink' of metal bats and the excited cheers of parents could always be heard coming from the other diamonds but did ours sound like that? Nope. Dead silence, with the occasional indecipherable moan from the opposing teams coaching staff as our teams supreme lack of skill literally made us so easy to defeat, that they had actually grown bored with us. Our outfielders were all overweight pimple kids and the infielders were so incompetent you might as well have tied their hands behind their backs. Every time the other team hit a grounder to the infield every single guy would go diving for the ball with literally no one covering a single base. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

The entire season ended up that way and I learned literally nothing about sports or self-esteem or team spirit. I did learn that Cocaine and coaching typically don't mix, and that clubbing stray animals with the bat after a game was frowned upon to the point of the police being called. Coach's taking out anger on children is always ok as long as their parents didn't come to the game that day (which, let's face it, after the first three horrific performances, every parent miraculously had some "excuse" to not show up).

Life was good. Baseball sucks. I'll stick to model trains.