I’ll beg your pardon if I seem distracted or ignore you over the next few days. My bandwagon is coming and I want to hop on at just the right time.
About the only time I show the slightest interest in baseball is when the local Little League team starts making a run at the Little League World Series. Not even the bench-clearing brawls in the Majors can get me to raise an eyebrow.
But as soon as some hometown kids start making a run at a genuine world championship, I’ll sit through an inning or six of one of the world’s most boring games.
And so the Sweetwater Valley Little League has the attention of myself and thousands around me as they play in the Little League West Regional Championship, prelude to the World Series in Pennsylvania.
You would think that watching two other teams make it to the big show — Parkview in 2009 won the World Championship and in 2013 Eastlake Little League came home with a national title — have made the casual observer blasé about yet another team doing well. But your thought would be misguided.
Maybe it’s the thirst for a national or world champion that makes us sit up and take notice. The Padres and Chargers haven’t done much to fill that void. Their last national championship dates further back than when some of the Sweetwater Valley Little Leaguers were born — never.
More likely it is the joy that is derived from watching kids playing a game and enjoying themselves the way that only kids can.
When kids hit a ball or catch a fly ball we know they’re doing it for love of the game, not because they’ve been contracted to make it their job.
We know that when they come home, win or lose, next season they won’t demand a better incentive clause (so many strike outs means no dish washing for X number of days) or ask to be traded to a different household because the parents there are willing to offer more amenities like room service and a 24-hour chauffeur detail.
They probably won’t ask for a publicly funded stadium. They’ll just go back to being who they are, sources of joy, hope and inspiration.
Kids being kids, whether it is on the ball field, on stage spelling scherenschnitte and nunatak during a televised spelling bee, or in an arena operating robots in a webcast competition remind us that when you’re young one of the most valuable lessons learned is that you try and do your best. The final result often times doesn’t matter. At least not at this stage in life.
The Sweetwater Valley ballplayers, like their predecessors and even all those teams who did not make it even this far in the tournament, offer a brief respite from the weight and gravity of life post childhood.
Thank you for that.
