Dearly beloved, we gather here today to celebrate the life and the memory of youth baseball.
For this year’s high school seniors, a long road that began in their small single digit days is coming to an end. Many will continue the game at ascending levels but, from here on, it is no longer a youth sport but a business enterprise. We wish our succeeding teammates well and hope that, when the last of this class’s cleats hang from a peg, they will remember their smallest days best, as do we. Because, in the coming weeks, the sun will have set forever on a key part of their time as a child.
The passage of childhood is a journey of many family milestones. For its devotees, most of theirs have been marked by baseball. Summer diets of concession stand hamburgers, blue Powerade and red dust blown in by the breeze have sustained the boys and their families. Countless vacations and discretionary purchases have yielded to considerations focused on the game — a litany of 3-2 counts, bad-hop grounders and soaring, high pop flies.
Beginning with a tee and continuing to a cap and gown, youngsters and their parents spend some 700 Saturdays, and thousands of the days between, practicing, playing, training with bat, glove and ball through a dedication that seems, at least, to last 18 months per year.
They do so because there’s an innocent simplicity to the game that calls to us along the way through our varied and inconstant lives. Probably no one who’s spent time around dugouts full of walking testosterone would call teenaged players “innocent,” but that condition proves more durable than you might believe. There is an innocence with which we begin that stays with a player for so long as pine tar is sticky and squeeze plays bring a crowd to its feet.
There is an innocence in the intensity with which all players prepare, an honest thrill when they do succeed, and instructional heartbreak when routine failure arrives.
Baseball has seen us through life’s other confusions. When our days’ guidelines are malleable and firm rules too few, the clarity of the diamond can keep us sane. When a hit is a hit, a walk scores a run, and a rundown is a bad place to be, we figure out the rest of our world can be figured out too.
Maturing expectations eventually sharpen basic innocence down to a fine and fragile point, one that peaks upon the last out of their last high school game. Whatever it is, whatever it was, whatever it’s meant to them all, it’s all over at that point for good. And there’s a good to that, too because, since they can never go back, the relationships captured in the dugouts and between the lines can never be changed. Perspectives should grow and understandings should come, but the results from their youth baseball lab are finite and firm.
For all of our boys, we give thanks for the time they’ve been given together to play, to learn and to grow. We pray the lessons these young men have absorbed will continue to reveal truths to them all the days of their lives. We are thankful for a game that lets old men remember what it was to be a boy, a game that helps a boy grow to become a man. We are thankful for a game that teaches routine failure is a part of any successful process, that teamwork and sacrifice are elemental to a life well-lived, that defeat is never final, and neither is victory.
Youth baseball is gone. From here on, Lord, we pray you’ll guide them in the way You would have them to go.
Amen.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 24 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
