Elijah's teeball coach has taken to playing him at second base because the boy actually seems to understand the concept of fielding the ball and running to the nearest base to record an out. Even so, Elijah hasn't yet reached Jeteresque maturity. One day at teeball practice, while yelling at some kid not to hit some other kid on the head with a bat, I looked up to see Elijah standing on first base with his pants around his ankles. When the next player hit the ball, Elijah had trouble making it around the bases while simultaneously pulling up his pants. When I asked him later why he'd done that, he said, "because it felt good."

Another morning, just before the game, coach asked the team, "now what are you supposed to yell when you get the ball?" The proper answer is "TIME OUT!" because otherwise every fourth play would be a grand-slam home run. But Elijah responded,

"Hey hey howdy howdy hi hi hello!"

"That's very original, Elijah," said coach, "but it's not right."

And thus our inaugural teeball season lurches ahead. Last Wednesday, Elijah's Yankees played a 6:30 game in Glassell Park, our first night game and our first one away from the friendly confines of the Tommy Lasorda Field Of Dreams. Because our league is pretty small, we play half our games against Glassell Park teams. For those of you who don't speak East Side L.A. code, here are some of the differences between the Silver Lake and Glassell Park leagues:

The Glassell Park teams are entirely Mexican-American and have about a 50-50 boy-girl split. The players each bring a dozen family members to the games, many of whom appear to have played competitive baseball at some point in their lives. Some of the Silver Lake teams have Mexican players, but mostly, they're as white as the cast of Gossip Girl. Speaking of girls, our teams have one or two, at most. Both parents rarely show up to the games. They're either sleeping off their hangovers or working extra hours to pay for their insanely overinflated Silver Lake mortgages.

Also, while Silver Lake is all about everyone having fun and participating, the Glassell Park teams play to win.

We learned this in our night game against the Padres. First of all, the Padres suited up 15 players. We usually have 12, but one of them was sick, one of them was on vacation in New York, and one of them has a 6 PM bedtime. This seems a bit early to me, but then again, his parents' evenings are their own. So they had 15, and we had nine, a skeleton crew by teeball standards.

Despite this, their coach played everyone in the field. So did our coach--everyone always plays the field in teeball--but he's been taking care to rotate players around, giving everyone a turn at every position, no matter how competent. The Padres' coach, on the other hand, played his best five in the infield, and then let all his five-year-old booger pickers hang out in an outfield cluster. The positions didn't change from inning to inning.

I worked as our team's third-base coach that night. At one point, the Padres' third baseman was moving around twitchily. His coach came up to him, looked at him sternly, and said, "Eduardo. You want to jump around like that? Then do it in the outfield." Harsh, coach. Meanwhile, our guys were wearing gloves on their heads and running after balls in unison, no matter their position, while the Padres whipped around the bases.

It was freezing out there, and the game went on forever. They must have scored 20 runs, which happens when you bat 15 players an inning. We did OK, but everyone was cold and tired and whiny by the end. Also, let's face it, Glassell Park is no place for a bunch of pasty hipsters and their wimpy kids to be hanging out after sundown. That said, our Yankee boys devoured the Sun Chips, string-cheese and Capri Suns that Regina brought for snacks. It's never too late or cold or sketchy for snack time.

I've spent a lot of time thinking, maybe even worrying, about the difference between Anglo and Latino youth-baseball cultures in L.A. The odds are impossibly long that any of the six-year-old Mexican players I've seen this season are going to be big-leaguers, minor leaguers, or even try to play professionally, but there's still something aspirational about the way they conduct themselves on the diamond. Baseball is serious business here in the heart of Dodger Country, maybe not a way out (after all, no one's really looking to escape Southern California), but at least as part of the equation leading to the way up. The Five Tools are a point of serious pride, a way to learn discipline, control, and cool slides. As Eduardo said to me one inning as he took his station after a particularly spectacular display on the bases, "I've got dirt in my mouth."

Not so much in hipster land, where there's always a sanitary wet wipe waiting to clean off the dirt. Eh, we figure. If our kid's not good at baseball, they can always start a band, or go to Cal Tech, or both. For Silver Lake kids, teeball is just another box to check in the endless activity stream, alongside birthday parties and movie premieres and cooking classes and art lessons and, for the truly unfortunate, Hebrew School. In Glassell Park, the players always take the extra base, even if it's 45 degrees outside, even if it's been dark for an hour, and especially if the gabacho-saturated opposing team is running around trying to pretend to whack one another with invisible light sabers or spreading their arms and shouting "I'm Superman!!!!" when heading for home on a ball fouled at the plate. While I realize that plenty of Mexican kids go to Cal Tech, and plenty of Anglo kids end up being good at baseball, there's still a difference. At least we didn't have to play in Echo Park. I hear they're super hard-core over there.

Or maybe the Padres' coach was just a little over-competitive. The next day at practice, we had some fielding drills. Then we played a game on Saturday morning and did just fine. In fact, it was our best game yet. We were only missing one player, and it had nothing to do with his bedtime.

Posted by at 2:48 PM | Permalink