Field Of Dreams Brings Memories Of Nightmares

ABINGDON, Va. – Being a newspaper editor in 2009 is difficult enough, but I’ve decided to compound my self-inflicted punishment by agreeing to help coach a T-ball team.
Fathering 4- and 6-year-old boys apparently doesn’t present a high enough degree of difficulty either, so now I need to mentor 10 of these tykes. Alas, it’s the only way my Tyler will agree to play.
The Harry L. Coomes Recreation Center, owned by the town of Abingdon, held its annual T-ball organizational meeting on Thursday evening, and organizer James Agner gave the same speech he says he gives every year: “This is T-ball. These are 5-, 6- and 7-year-old kids. If you expect your child to turn a double play, this is not the league for you. Wait five years and put them in Little League,” Agner said.
These little fellows and girls will be more apt to pick dandelions in right field than run the bases in the correct order, Agner warned a room full of parents. But by then, my mind was wandering back 20-something years – fixated on the nightmarish summer I spent umpiring Little League baseball in my hometown of Tullahoma, Tenn.
First off, I was an excellent umpire – and not in the way that “Rain Man” Raymond Babbitt was an excellent driver. I didn’t hit the curbs. I was eagle-eyed and lightning-witted. I not only could call balls and strikes with the best of them, but I knew the Little League strike zone like a human GPS unit.
Skills and talent don’t cut it in Little League, though, at least not for an umpire. So in the first half of the Season From Hell, this is what happened to me for $7.50 a game. I wish I were embellishing. I am not. I’ve blocked out the really bad stuff. Here’s what I remember:
n The tires on my 1972 Chevrolet Monte Carlo were slashed after a night game.
n A coach attacked me behind home plate during a game. (I held him off with a stiff arm; thankfully, he was 5 feet 4, and his short arms meant his flailing punches landed short of my face.)
n A mob of parents gathered below the press box to jump me after a game, so I stayed in the press box until midnight.
n A coach kicked dirt on me and kept calling me by my first name. That’s because he knew me – he was my family’s State Farm agent. To teach him a lesson, my parents pulled all five of our automobiles out from him and picked another agent. My transgression? I called his son out at third base after he was tagged 15 feet from the bag.
n The coaches voted to fire me midseason, but the umpiring chief had my back and allowed me to finish up the year. “But you probably don’t want to come back next season,” he said.
“Damn straight,” I said. “I’m going away to college so I can make more than $15 for four hours of work while wearing a chest protector inside of my shirt in 98-degree weather. And I won’t be cursed by parents. And 11-year-olds’ wayward pitches won’t hit the dirt and bounce up and hit me in the ... ”
“You do wear a cup, right?” the umpiring chief asked. “As far as you know,” I said.
Indeed, I went to college and became a journalist. If you divide my salary by my hours, then I now make about $15 for every four hours of work. I still get cursed by parents – they’re just not sitting in bleachers at the time. They continue to scream the same old question – “are you blind?” – but now add “and dumb?” They usually yell this through a telephone receiver, or an all-caps e-mail. (All caps in cyberspeak means they’re yelling.)
Meanwhile, I can relax on the T-ball field when the season opens in two weeks. That’s because I won’t be an umpire – just an assistant coach for a team whose players haven’t even been selected yet.
I have no idea what kind of coach I’ll be. I was a heck of a good baseball player in my day. And I coach journalism every day. Maybe T-ball coaching will become a niche.
But will I be Billy Martin and kick dirt on some young umpire? I doubt it. They don’t keep score in T-ball. And besides, I’d rather take the entire team to my house so they can rid my yard of dandelions. That would be way cheaper than three bags of Scott’s Turf Builder. One bag of Scott’s would cost me practically a day’s pay. That’s because I went to college to become a journalist.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier but once had dreams of umpiring in the Major Leagues. Reach him at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513 and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jtoddbhc.