Baseball needs dads.
Posted on 02/26/2011 2:07:04 PM PST by mbeaven
Last fall I had the great pleasure of helping coach my son’s baseball team. It was something new to me. I didn’t grow-up with baseball and there is no professional or significant college team in my town. That said, I grew in appreciation of
Baseball needs dads.
the baseball: The sound of the crack of the bat when a player got a good hit, the strategy, the feel of a ball when you catch it in your glove. There is a real beauty in the sport.
Practice was in a local park that had a couple of baseball fields but also had a soccer field that we drove past to get to the baseball diamond. After about two months of passing the same people on our way to practice, I made an observation: Soccer practice had a lot of moms. There were at least four lady coaches and sometimes no men at all. This was in stark contract to our baseball practices. Yeah, moms were there, but they were behind the fence, cheering on their sons or gossiping, sometimes looking after younger kids. On the baseball field were half a dozen men along with their sons, teaching the fundamentals of the game.
Soccer attracts the single mom types and kids with dads that are missing in action.
The early 1990′s popularized the term “soccer mom”. At the same time, baseball popularity declined. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was some sort of relation between the two and single-parent households.
With baseball, it is almost always the dads who go out in the yard to play catch, strengthening the bond between father and son. Men coach, rarely women do. Plus the strategy and rules are significantly more complicated in baseball than soccer. It seems that baseball needs dads. The sport was built for them.
Does soccer attract moms and kids where dad is out of the picture? No dad to toss around the ball with? You can kick the soccer ball around the yard by yourself. Barely paying rent on
Baseball's sanctuary is seperated by the iconostasis of the sports world, behind which dads train boys how to be men using baseball as their means.
mom’s income? Soccer equipment is significantly cheaper. Not too competent at sports? It doesn’t take much experience to tell a kid to kick a ball. How to throw a curve ball, now that is a different story.
Compare the fields. Soccer is an open field with parents on lawn chairs right along the sideline. It is almost leisurely, relaxed. Baseball, the neophytes are separated by a fence, the iconostasis of the sports world. Through it is where dads teach their sons to be men.
I’m sure soccer is a perfectly fine sport. Most of the world plays it, but in America, it just seems that soccer has a strong affinity with moms entering the sphere of dad, often because dad is not there.
After 2 years of female coaches, my son quit baseball. He has always had a male coach for soccer, and prefers soccer because there is more contact (his favorite sport being football). Maybe it’s where you live ... he has never had a female soccer coach and we always have dads on the field helping with soccer practice.
Good article. Fyi, in the same paragraph with iconostasis, a word I never heard of, you misspelled separate. It happens. By the way, what’s iconostasis?
Or pitch to you. My dad used to take me out to the local Little League field, stand on the pitcher's mound with a dozen baseballs, and just throw heat. We'd walk out together to retrieve the ones I hit and talk baseball. Not a mom sort of activity, to be sure.
I’m betting you know what an icon is. I’m also betting you know what stasis means. Put the two together and what might it mean? An icon fixed in place, a barrier, a dividing line.
OMG! WOW! You actually posted the full article! Thanks! :-)
Baseball rarely has the thrill of a zero-zero tie.
The French are successful at soccer. That should tell us something right there.
My son is now 24. He played a little baseball, but soccer was his primary sport through high school, playing high school soccer in the fall and premier travel soccer in the spring.
Today he follows his two favorite baseball teams (Tigers and Cubs) religiously but only follows soccer once every four years. It just isn’t fast-moving enough for him.
If you are not playing or have a kid on the field, soccer becomes real boring real fast.
You really have to see one to understand what it is. To call it a barrier really misses the point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconostasis
In 10-20 years watch lacrosse cut into soccer big time in the U.S. It’s faster moving, far more exciting and has a lot more scoring.
Plus it is a sport that originated here..
That'll never happen while the Eurosnobs are in charge. Lacrosse is uniquely American, as American as baseball. It has roots in the Iroquois game of Baggattaway. "Indian Ball" is still played by the Cherokee at least, sometimes on the peculiar mountaintop balds of western North Carolina. Those balds and the game itself have legend associated with them.
I was raised playing soccer in Alabama. From age 8 to 18 I went to soccer practice, followed the local college team, and watched the World Cup every four years (and still do).
Not once did my all male team have a female coach.
Not once did anyone bad mouth America.
Not once did we compare ourselves to baseball players, or our sport to baseball. Many of us played both.
Soccer is part of America. It may not be the part of our country that you interact with, but that doesn’t make it un- American. It wasn’t invented here, but neither was golf, boxing, wrestling, shooting, archery, chess or rugby. Americans are the best at many of those, and someday will be at soccer.
Thanks. It seems there is a spiritual aspect to the word that barrier does not completely convey. Now I have a new word, just have to figure out a way to use it. The use of it in connection with the fencing around a baseball field is apt.
As a spectator I enjoyed both Rugby Union and American Football. Just wondered how Americans regard rugby.
Soccer and hockey are very popular for boys and girls of all ages and over here moms and dads are actively involved. I can’t actually think of a single instance of there being a “soccer mom” on the sidelines or assisting in the running of the team, where there wasn’t a “soccer dad” doing the training, practice, refereeing and so on.
I think the key difference is that When Brits get involved in team sports they want to play something that goes on pretty much uninterrupted for over an hour and where almost all players will stay on the field from start to finish unless they’re carted off through injury or sent off for committing a foul.
Soccer, both forms of rugby, Twenty20 cricket and hockey all fit into that mindset.
My home town did set up an American Football team and got plenty of spectators, but it had a huge problem retaining players. There was no shortage of people who wanted to try the game, but our Sports Billys (Jocks in American lingo) expect to be on the pitch for the entire duration of a match and they can’t stand interruptions in play or being sat on a bench.
They couldn’t cope with the idea of a three hour game with the ball being in play for less than 60 minutes.
One guy I was at university with, commented on a sullen Italian soccer player called Ravanelli who played for Middlesbrough FC. This guy pretty much stood around for 85 out of the 90 minutes on the soccer field waiting for the ball to come to him, while the Brazilian counterpart Juninho in the same team would be running from one end of the pitch to the other and back, chasing the action for the full ninety minutes.
But, once in a blue moon, the ball would arrive at Ravanelli’s feet and he’d actually start to play like an international soccer star. For about 30 seconds. Then, he’d lose the ball, and just stop moving.
My friend drily observed, Ravanelli had the perfect temprament (if not the physique) for American Football. I think that’s a bit unfair.
He was more suited to Test Cricket.
If you look in the crowd during a typical English Premier League match, you won’t find many women in the stands. The chants alone would drive most women away.
Fugettaboutit!
The real sport is Team Handball, so popular in rest of the world. Sorta between soccer and basketball. Dynamic game, artistry, lotsa goals and much safer than fooootball.
OI! That's fighting talk! Baseball developed into an American sport but it most certainly didn't originate in America. My home county of Kent, in England, has all manner of folk sports that have been around since the Middle Ages, and feature a bat and ball.
One I used to play in my leafy Kentish village, was bat and trap, which is little-known and is mainly kept alive by village pub teams. The other, a far more common game, is rounders... which is like American baseball in many respects and in fact was referred to as "Base Ball" as long ago as the mid 18th Century.
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