"T-Ball Society"

It is baseball season, the national pastime. Baseball has a special place in the hearts of most Americans. As a boy, I belonged to the Boy’s Club and played baseball at the local park for the first time when I was about eight years old. I remember taking my bicycle down Western Avenue to Welles Park on Saturday mornings to play my first organized games. Back then, we didn’t even have uniforms, only hats and T-shirts. We learned how to catch, throw and hit from young coaches who seemed much older to us “little guys”. I remember hitting those first balls out of the infield, and the crack of that bat; there was no aluminum back then. Some of us were better than others; some caught better and some hit better, but we all loved the game. There were no girls on those teams back then (it was the Boy’s Club). We were broken down into teams, and we were given a schedule of games we were to play throughout the summer. We had practice two or three times a week, and we kept score in every game. Yes, we had winners and losers, because in games we learned competition.

Today, kids still play baseball in local communities at different parks with different organizations; and some differences in the way the game is taught. The games today are sometimes played with “mixed teams”, both boys and girls together. The youngest players learn to hit the baseball from a “T” instead of from a pitched ball, and they usually don’t keep score. In today’s world, we don’t want our children to realize that some kids may not be as skilled as other kids. Today we live in a society where we are in a constant worry of hurting the feelings of one person or another; this is the “everybody is great” philosophy that has made the words “ambition” and “winning” seem like bad things.

I guess I’m an “old fashioned” guy, I believe we all need to learn about winning and losing when we are young, because if we don’t learn it then, we are surely in for a big shock later on in life; nobody wins every time! If a person is told that they are “great” all the time, they will never understand that in the “real world”, they may not be “great all the time”; yes, they may fail.

We have a pervasive belief in America today that everybody is entitled to everything, regardless of effort or dedication. There is a belief that there is a conspiracy to keep people from having what they want by some “agenda of the rich”. What this philosophy fails to recognize is that most of those “rich people” started out as regular folks who applied themselves and took risks to attain their wealth and position, and along the way, they suffered some failures but went forward instead of blaming others for their failures.

We have a political movement called “OCCUPY WALL STREET” that believes that those who have attained success should give away what they have worked for to those who have failed to work for anything. We hear talk of inequality of wealth from these dissidents, but these people failed to see that the Constitution doesn’t give anyone a guarantee of success. You, as an American, are given a chance and it is up to each individual to use that chance, or to throw it away. If you throw it away, either through laziness or not taking advantage of what America offers, your failure belongs to you, not your neighbor.

Life, like baseball, will have winners and losers, and a “T-ball” mentality will only produce losers. Nobody is going to set up a perfect life for you, like a ball on a “T”. Life will be thrown at you, and you better prepare yourself to have a “batting eye” or you will “strike out” and you have no one to blame but yourself. Remember, we all start out on the same “ball field” in America.