Only lasted 1 season, but it was memorable

Only lasted 1 season, but it was memorable
                        

In the summer of the moon landing, the Pony League baseball team I played for won 18 games in a row and the championship.

Nine years later I’m coaching a team coming off an 18-loss season.

Talk about a change in perspective.

Let me admit at the outset what you’ve probably already surmised if you’re a faithful reader of the stories that appear in this space.

My temperament wasn’t exactly conducive to accepting losing; in fact, you could argue I didn’t fit the profile of a coach at all.

I was 23 that spring when I gathered the team for the first time, 12 months removed from my college graduation, working full-time at my hometown newspaper and playing ball myself, all the while trying to, well, widen my social circle, if you catch my drift.

In short, I had a lot on my plate.

Still, when I was approached to take on the managerial duties for a team whose last coach had quit, I felt obliged to say yes, because in a small town, where everybody knows everybody else, that’s just what you do. You get involved, hoping to make a difference.

And make no mistake about it … Pony League was the big time.

The well-tended field itself had lights, in-ground dugouts, signage on the outfield fences, a scoreboard, a concession stand and a press box, complete with an official scorer and public address system.

When I was 14 and in my second season — the aforementioned and fabled 18-2 campaign — I got the biggest thrill standing with my cap over my heart as the national anthem played over the speakers and the American flag fluttered in the breeze out in center field.

Of course, not losing over the course of two months went a long way toward creating memories that would always be sweet. My job as manager for a woebegone team that knew next to nothing about winning was to convince my players it could be done.

This was two years after the release of “The Bad News Bears,” which remains among my favorite baseball movies, and though I didn’t see myself as the broken-down, middle-aged Walter Matthau, I’d be lying if I said his Morris Buttermaker wasn’t an influence.

In the film Buttermaker proves to be a lousy manager, utterly removed from the pain his team endures losing game after game. It’s only when he brings on Amanda Wurlizter (Tatum O’Neal) that things begin to turn around and, suddenly, winning becomes a habit, one that carries the Bears all the way to the title contest.

In real life, of course, it didn’t work out that way, though the Barn Boys did win more than they lost, finishing the season at 11-9, far better than the 2-18 record they’d logged the previous summer. I don’t like to blow my own horn, but I did my very best to teach the guys how to play winning baseball, because losing simply sucked.

Pony League, like all sports, offered a simple, binary proposition.

You either won or you didn’t.

Clean, crystalline logic, easy for 13- and 14-year-olds to grasp.

All of which was fine and dandy in the abstract, but I sat up nights after games, updating the stats, working out new strategies, figuring ways to get any kind of an edge, all the while worrying the team wasn’t having enough fun, making those memories.

And then came the fateful play that changed everything.

It was one of those nights when nothing good happened: booted grounders, dropped pop-ups, pitches that bounced to the backstop, the kind of game you just wanted to be over, no one getting hurt.

From my perch on the top step of the dugout, I had a perfect view of what happened at third base, the way an opposing player — a big, beefy, loud-mouthed kid, tailor-made for a dead-end career as a prison guard — barreled into my third baseman even though there was no play at the bag. He did it on purpose, just to be ugly, mean.

As I bent over my third baseman, telling him to take it easy, just take deep breaths, I muttered something very nasty under my breath, a word aimed at the galoot who had taken such a cheap shot.

I can’t tell you what that profanity was, but I will say it had three syllables and was immortalized in George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” monologue, a rant that’s a classic.

A few months later, I received a letter from the league informing me that my services would not be required for the upcoming season and that I should turn in all the equipment, like right now.

It was typed in red ink, all the words capitalized, like a threat.

Turns out the kid who flattened my third baseman was related to the league president and, well, you can connect those dots.

As I’ve said, in a small town, everybody knows everybody else.

When I think back on that Pony League summer, two years after the bicentennial, a time when I still believed getting involved could make a difference, I’m extremely pleased about one thing.

We won more often than we lost and had some fun along the way.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com and at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where baseball is the coin of the realm.


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