More From "Mullet"

This is from chapter two of my saga, The Umpire Has A Mullet.

CHAPTER TWO: Skills Test and Hypothermia


Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Jack Frost nipping at your nose. Must be recreational baseball time!

Youth baseball is not a spring sport.

Youth baseball starts somewhere between the last out of Fall Ball (more about this complete waste of time later) and the last present being unwrapped at Christmas.

Maybe it is just around here. Here in Cobb County, Georgia, people are baseball crazy mainly because it is a great way of achieving some sort of status. When I was a kid in Cobb County, Georgia you had status if you worked at Lockheed or if your kid appeared on “The Popeye Club”. (“The Popeye Club” was a kid’s show on WSB-TV that featured “Officer Don” a policeman that introduced Popeye cartoons and a puppet named “Orville The Green Dragon”. You didn’t learn anything about math, spelling, or tolerance. It was great.
And for the record, my Dad worked at Lockheed Georgia and I made my television debut on “The Popeye Club”. I am not a total loser.)

Now you can be a nuclear scientist in this county but if your kid is not on an All-Star team, the people who can barely wipe their rear ends without video instruction will look down their noses at you because their little Shane was on the Soap Creek Pony All-Star team with his friends Hunter, Taylor, and Tyler. “Sure, he can split an atom, but he never taught his kid how to hit.”

Take a guess when you first register for youth baseball. Early January. Parents around here wait in line for hours to get their little Tater a place in the local park’s baseball leagues. The good news is that once you get Tater in a park, you will never have to wait in line again to sign him up for baseball. Each year, around Christmas, you get a little reminder in the mail to send in the registration for the spring season.

The park we played at had a great way of making you work the concession stand.

Parks do not make money with the various leagues they provide. They make money with their concession stands. Sometimes I think youth league baseball is just a way to bring people to the concession stands like country music is what radio stations play in between commercials for tires.

Our park said, Ok every parent on every team has to work in the concession stand. If they don’t, we will not send you a registration in the mail and you will have to wait in line like you did when you signed Tater up in the first place.

To my knowledge, every parent worked at least one shift in the concession stand each season.


Once you get Tater signed up, the park sends out a postcard listing the date and time of “The Skills Test”. One time, our “Skills Test” was two days after one of our famous Georgia ice storms.

In Georgia, it rarely snows, but we do have storms which we call snow. Real Georgians will have a running duck fit when there is a threat of snow. We buy all of the bread and milk at Kroger’s (or as we call it, “Krogers”) and listen to the Yankees laugh at us. Then the storm hits, knocks out all of the power and we stay home from work. The Yankees look outside, get into their cars, and drive into a ditch because we have ice not snow. We call it ‘snow’ just to throw Yankees off.

“The Skills Test” is when the various coaches sit in lawn chairs to evaluate the skill level of each kid that is signed up for the season’s league. They are usually dressed in heavy overcoats and lacking their gluttus maximus because they have frozen their butts off.

When your little Tater arrives, you go to a table with the only civilizing force that can be hoped for at a park sitting at it: a mom. She finds Tater’s name and assigns him a number. Unfortunately, 400 hundred other Taters are there too.

“The Skills Test” is usually three pitches from a coach to see if your kid can hit. Then the kid runs to first base to see how fast he runs. Finally, the kid grabs his glove and the coach throws three grounders to the kid to see if he can field and three high pops to see if the kid can catch.
Then you go home. This takes hours.

In my son’s first skills test at this park, he was in first grade. In first grade baseball, you can win or lose based solely on skill-the skill of an adult to throw a pitch to a kid that at most is four feet tall. The coach pitching this skills test was very good. Kids were whacking the ball very well. However, since he had pitch three pitches to four hundred kids, his arm was worn out and about three kids before mine another fellow took over.

I know this fellow is faithful to his wife, works hard, and loves Jesus but he could not throw a ball into the strike zone of a six year old. I supposed he just wasn’t blessed this way.

The kids in front of Ben took literal hacks at the ball like they were chopping wood. Finally Ben’s turn comes and I wanted him to look good in front of all of the other frozen parents. So I mustered up all of the great parental wisdom I could and yelled, “Use The Force, Ben!” I thought this was fairly humorous and I got a bunch of stares from the other frozen parents. Maybe if it had been warmer I would have gotten a laugh. I would have settled for a chuckle.

Rule One of “The Skills Test”: Never make lame ‘Star Wars’ jokes while your kid is batting.

Rule Two: The kid that tests right before your kid will hit the three pitches to him over the fence and cause the coaches in the lawn chairs to scribble in mass his number on their note pads

Rule Three: Your kid will foul off the first pitch, miss the second one, and hit a dribbler to the coach pitcher on the third one. He will trip while running to first base. He misses the three grounders thrown to him and all three high pops will miss his glove and hit him in the head. You have to explain to the Emergency Room doctor that you did not beat your kid, rather he was at a baseball skills test and the bruises around his eyes are from missed high pops. He then wants you to explain the hypothermia.


After the Skills Test, you retreat back home where you wait usually a week or so for your child’s coach to call you. Nine times out of ten this coach will, A) Mispronounce your last name*, B)Mispronounce your child’s name C) Mispronounce your child’s team name, and finally, D) Give you the wrong date, time,and location of the first practice.
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Before you actually go to a practice, it is important to buy your child the proper equipment. Some sports, this can be cheap. Wait, I take that back. There is nothing cheap about youth sports.

You would think that basketball would be cheap. Not if you get the kid the shoes everyone has to have. The AirAnswerOneJamesAndOneShox, which has its own motor and parachute. If your kid shows up with the Target on sale shoes, you might as well figure that the child is not going to amount to much.

In baseball you need a glove. Hopefully you have one of your own that you can give your kid. Or you can be like me and have a kid that is left handed. (If you have a kid like this, check with the hospital he was born at and see if they have a return policy.) So, we had to buy a glove.

Then you need shoes. Do not try to get by with soccer shoes or football shoes. Somehow, those shoes are different from baseball shoes. I’m not quite sure how the baseball shoes help, but it is always a joy to see a child, like my son, tie their baseball shoes once in the life of the shoe and then spend an average of thirty minutes trying to get the shoes back on.

And how could I forget the bat? Bats today can cost anywhere from four thousand dollars to two million dollars. I recommend taking out a home equity loan to buy a baseball bat.

To pick the right bat simply go into the sporting goods store and say in a loud voice, “I have four thousand dollars in my pocket and I want to buy a bat for my five year old.” The salesman will sell you a BAZOOKA BOMBER signed by Barry ‘Tater’ Bonds. It will weigh about 12 pounds. Your kid will not be able to hold it above his head and he will forget it at the park one day.







Footnote:
*This is as good place as any to advise you as to how to pronounce my last name. It is only FIVE FREAKING LETTERS AND EVERYBODY WANTS TO MISPRONOUNCE IT. The correct pronunciation of my last name is MAY-NIS not MAN-IS. I’ve had people, and this is the truth, tell me, to my face, that I am not pronouncing my own last name correctly. My father said MAY-NIS. My grandmother said MAY-NIS. My MAY-NIS kinfolk said MAY-NIS. When Moses came down from Mt Sinai, he said, “Hey MAY-NIS, look at these tablets!” Yes, it rhymes with a comical part of the human anatomy. While I’m at it, my first name has four letters: A-L-A-N. Just because there are several ways to spell it, doesn’t mean that when you refer to me you can spell it ANY OLD WAY YOU WANT . I know you had an uncle who spelled it A-L-L-E-N or A-L-L-A-N or A-L-A-I-N. That still does not make my name spelled that way. Don’t make me have to explain this again.
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