My rewarding baseball managing career

In a few weeks, Greene County youth baseball and softball will get underway for another season.

Twice — first about 35 years ago, then some 25 years ago — I took on an assistant coaching position for expansion Little League baseball teams in Jefferson.

It was a rewarding experience, and any adult, parent or not, who undertakes it will find it heartwarming and uplifting.

It will also probably be frustrating and headscratching. And it will have funny moments which you’ll never recall without grinning.

Back about 1980, the late Kim Clark had signed up as manager of the Reds, a new, expansion Little League team. He asked if I would serve as assistant manager, which I agreed to do.

The way the expansion process worked back then, each of the existing teams could retain three players before the league draft started. The addition of the Reds boosted the number of teams in the league to five. That meant, in actual terms, that the 12 best players in the league — three from each of the other four teams — were off limits to us.

A son played for the team coached by his dad, so son Dan ended up on the Reds.

We had a roster of eager boys who took baseball seriously and wanted to do their best. Their enthusiasm made coaching an enjoyable job for Kim and me.

For most of the season, though, enthusiasm was about all we had going for us. The Reds struggled.

One day, about halfway through the season, our family returned from a few days’ trip. Dan was out in the porch when one of his teammates rode by on his bicycle.

“How’d we do?” Dan called out, about the game we missed while being gone.

“We lost 21 to 6,” came the teammate’s reply.

“We got six runs?” Dan said incredulously. We didn’t usually do that.

But we got better. Winning isn’t everything, but a victory now and then is important for a youngster’s self-worth. We tallied a few wins by the end of the season, and in the next few seasons as well.

Fast forward 10 years or so.
More boys than expected that year signed up for Little League, and an expansion team was necessary once again. The league hadn’t yet found a manager for the new squad, so one of the other coaches drafted for the new team — the Athletics — as well as for his own.

Both Justin Johnson and our son Dave found themselves on the expansion Athletics as a result of the draft.

Justin’s dad, Terry Johnson, was asked if he might be willing to manage the squad, and Terry in turn asked me to be his assistant. I was back in the game.

Son Matt joined the team a couple years later when he reached Little League age. Then he was drafted by the Yanks two years afterward, and I switched over to help coach that team.

I probed Terry Johnson’s memory about our coaching days recently, and we had a great half-hour or so recalling our favorite incidents.

Nearly every player on our team at one time or another (some of them every day) asked to pitch.

Little League, Terry and I believed, should be a time when kids could get experience at many different positions, even it that meant we would sacrifice results on the scoreboard.

So we did.

One of our most enthusiastic players persisted in asking to pitch. Finally one game, when we had a decent lead, we agreed, and he trotted out to the mound.

Our catcher gave him the sign, and he threw his first pitch 40 feet. (The Little League pitching mound, I think, is 44 feet from the plate.)  

His next pitch went over the backstop, which is at least 15 feet high.

He didn’t appear discouraged, and we left him in for a few more pitches, but finally replaced him on the mound when he started to get frustrated.

We had had a large lead, but the margin narrowed, and it continued to do so in the later innings, until we finally lost the game.

It was Little League policy that every player on a team must play at least two innings in every game. We had moved our budding pitcher to the mound after he had played a couple of innings in the outfield that game.

After we lost, and were packing up the gear, he came up to Terry and said, “We were ahead when you pulled me out.”

Our catcher was dependable, but not usually eager to step outside his comfort zone. One day, an opposing batter got on first base and taunted our pitcher by pretending to steal second after every pitch, then nonchalantly walking back to first.

Manager Terry kept urging our catcher to “just throw it down there” to keep the runner honest. He didn’t do it for several pitches. Then all of a sudden he did, rifling a perfect throw on a line to our first baseman.

The taunting runner was out by six feet.

It was a high point of the entire season for us, and for a few games afterward, our catcher threw many times to first. Apparently he enjoyed it as much as we did.

One of our smaller players brought his own bat to the first game. “It’s what I hit my home runs with,” he explained.

The bat was as huge as a tree, and neither Terry nor I could swing it effectively. Neither could its owner; by the time he got it around, the catcher had about thrown the ball back to the pitcher.

After his first couple of at-bats, he switched to a lighter model and did pretty well at the plate.

Late in one game, the bases were loaded against us, and one of the league’s best players came to the plate. He lifted a high fly to deep center field. Our centerfielder turned around, raced back to the fence, jumped and put up his glove at the last second, and the ball fell into it.

Our jaws dropped, our team went wild and our fielder probably still recalls the thrill.

The A’s went 0 and 13 our first year, 2 and 11 the second, and started out our third year about 2 and 5.

We then won nine straight games and finished around 11 and 5.

The season was shortened that year by heavy rains that canceled the last couple of games.

It’s a balancing act to manage players well enough to win a decent number of games, yet give every player, good and not so good, a decent amount of playing time.

It doesn’t always work out as you hope, but when your players and their parents thank you, the time and effort are well worth it. The memories are a bonus.