D3baseball.com Daily Dose

‘RSSmith’ posted this reflection on our message board, but I thought it was worth more prominence, so here it is on the front page. He’s the dad of a Johns Hopkins player, but I think the sentiment can apply to any team in any sport.

I drove home last night from the South Regional of the NCAA Division III National Championship Tournament where I watched my son play in his last college baseball game. His team lost 11-7 in the title game. When I got home around midnight, I drank a beer before going to bed. Beer doesn’t taste as good when your kid’s team loses. I thought about how fast those four years flew by and how much my son had grown. He added an inch in height and thirty-five pounds in weight. He added five miles-per-hour to his fastball (but in my opinion, he lost some movement on it). He added enough whiskers to his chin to achieve “scruff”, and he added enough years to his age to get served at the local hangout using his own ID. He added several hundred friends to his Facebook page and several hundred words to his vocabulary—words like “grit” and “commitment” and “dependability”. He learned that “camaraderie” is not just about sharing laughs with your teammates (there were many) but also tears (there were some).

I got up this morning and did something I haven’t done in four years—cleaned out the trunk of my car. You see, we always took my car to the game.

The first thing I pulled out of the trunk was an old laundry basket that contained hooded sweatshirts, ear muffs and gloves, a blanket, some towels, and a yellow rain slicker that I paid way too much for at the University Bookstore because I needed to be standing at the fence for a double header in a persistent drizzle. We won’t be needing that gear in the trunk anymore because now we don’t have to go to games if the weather is bad.

I took out the folding picnic table and lawn chairs and put them away. It will seem really strange from now on to get that table out and put sandwiches on it and not have thirty-five dirty, sweaty, smelly baseball players line up to grab some food and act like it was the best meal they ever had in their lives.

I found a folder with several dozen MapQuest printouts to places like Collegeville, Pennsylvania; Danville, Virginia; Salisbury, Maryland; and Appleton, Wisconsin. I started to throw it away, then I thought, “No, it would be fun to go back to those places.” I recalled some lines from a Robert Frost poem about “knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back,” and I threw the folder out.

There were several large bags of sunflower seeds that never made it into the dugout basket. I think I’ll give those to the Little Leaguer down the street so he can start honing that particular baseball skill. I’m sure his mom won’t mind.

I found my white baseball cap with the blue jay on the front. It had been relegated to the trunk after a determination that its good luck value was limited to non-conference games at Homewood.

As I was about to shut the trunk, my neighbor spotted me and walked over. Finding me bleary-eyed and sniffling, he asked if I was okay. I smiled for him and explained, “Allergies.”