Just Watch the Game Again Excerpt

Youth Sports

When did kids’ sports get turned upside down? Was it when the divorce rates went up and mothers started getting involved?

Here’s how it used to work: You learned, usually from your dad and/or older kids in the neighborhood, how to catch and throw a baseball. (Hitting was the last thing that you learned.)

When your parents were convinced that you liked baseball and had some idea how to play it, they looked into getting you into an organized youth league and on to a team.

In 2011, here’s how it works: Parents decide that it’s time for their kid to play baseball. Usually it’s way before the kid actually knows anything about baseball or has any desire to play it -- around six years old. Mom and dad find a league and get their kid on a team. They give him a uniform and take lots of pictures because he looks really cute. Then they put him on the field in his cute uniform and pretend that he’s playing baseball. The parents and grandparents feel obligated to go to his games and they show up for every one of them with their folding chairs.

Nobody can catch.

Nobody can throw and nobody can hit.

The kids, when they’re not batting, are standing around looking at birds, playing with the dirt and picking their noses. When the season is over, everybody gets a two-foot trophy. And America takes one more step toward total wussification.

Pittsburgh’s Baddest Man

You’ve heard of NFL players having their vertical leap measured. Sam Brady made one of the most famous horizontal leaps in American history.

He had been chasing a group of Indians into what is now known as Portage County, Ohio, and he ambushed them near a small lake. (If you’ve driven on I-80 to go to Cleveland for a Steelers-Browns game, you’ve passed it many times. It’s called Brady’s Lake. ) A second group of Indians came along and captured Brady and his men.

Remember, he knew that he was a prize catch and that if he were caught he would die a slow, agonizing death.

The Indians knew exactly who he was and they planned their version of a major tailgate party. He was going to be burned at the stake, but Brady was such a big deal that they kept him confined so that they could invite the surrounding tribes to the party, including, of course, the Cleveland Indians, led by Chief Wahoo, who was such a big fan of burnings at the stake that seeing one would cause him to walk around with a perpetual stupid grin on his face. Brady was stripped naked and made to run the gauntlet.

A good 40 time came in handy if you were ever chosen for that lovely exercise. Every Indian in the village formed two lines and you had to run the length of the line while they clubbed, stabbed or poked you with whatever they chose. (The 18th century version of covering a kickoff.) The only rule was that they had to hit you from behind after you went by. They didn’t want you falling down and ruining the effect.