One of my childhood loves was baseball. I collected baseball cards, treated with oil my share of baseball gloves, and I was always excited see the pros play.
Most of my free time as a kid was spent in the front yard playing ghostman baseball games with my brother and a neighbor until the sun went down. I was all-time pitcher. The patch of dead grass in the middle of the front yard was my pitcher’s mound (sorry, dad!). The original wooden banisters leading up the front steps of our house were no match for my fastball nor for my brother’s aluminum bat (sorry again, dad!).
I lived baseball.
As much as I loved playing baseball, I was not able to play in an organized league with my peers. I would have been squashed! They were too fast and the pitchers threw too hard. I wasn’t that fond of going to bat, anyway. But, sometime around 10th grade, I found my chance to play real organized baseball on a real little league field. Chalk lines, a raised pitcher’s mound, batting helmets, uniforms, stadium lights, dugouts, umpires. This was great!
It is called the Challenger League. It was a new program that the Little League launched that gave kids with physical and mental disabilities a chance to play organized ball. I signed up to play with no hesitation. So did one of my friends who has cerebral palsy.
We practiced twice a week and had a game every weekend. This was going to be awesome!
Just one thing, though. My friends and I noticed after a couple weeks into the season that the Challenger League wasn’t what we had hoped. We knew to run to a ground ball and pick it up…fast. We knew how to throw…hard. We knew how to hit…far and hard. Most of the other kids in the Challenger League did not do any of these things fast or hard.
In the Challenger League, each inning ended when everybody on each team got a chance to bat. There were no runners stranded because each batter got to cross home plate as each half inning came to an end. And the pace of play was understandably slow, because most of the kids who played needed to be told what to do with the ball.
Little Leaguers were urged to volunteer to help with Challenger League practices and games. They spaced themselves out across the infield and were there to guide us through games. As I was playing defense, I often was mistaken by these volunteers as one of them. One of them once told me to stop fielding balls and actually let one of the players play for a change. I responded, “I am one of the players!”
My friends quit after playing one season because it wasn’t fun for them. I played on.
I played for two seasons. I played until I realized that I was more of a burden to the Challenger League than just one of its players. I realized this after an infield play that didn’t end well.
Here’s what I recollect: I’m playing 3rd base. The batter pulls a ball and it dribbles up the 3rd base line. I rush to the ball, bare-hand it, throw across my body and across the infield to first base.
Well, Annie, a girl my age with downs syndrome and the daughter of the guy who started the Challenger League in our area, was playing first base. And I could see it before it happened.
My throw clocked Annie in the head.
She started crying.
I could hear gasps of dismay from the parents in the stands. I just did something horrible. I beamed a little girl with downs syndrome in the head with a baseball. (It was one of those softer baseballs, by the way.)
That was my queue. I quit playing in the Challenger League after the 2nd season.
Looking back at it, I should have quit playing Challenger baseball after that first season. I should have stopped playing and started volunteering instead. I should have been one of those volunteers that I was always mistaken for.
Since then, I always thought that I should find another Challenger League…this time to volunteer for. That would be closure. That would be healing.
