A touchy-feely, Dr. Phil-type question.... about baseball

It's been a tough season for Youngest Son's travel team, the Raptors (as I call them here); this past Wednesday night they played a doubleheader against two different teams -- and lost both by "slaughter."

Slaughter rules, or mercy rules, differ from league to league. In the Raptors' league, the game is called after five innings (instead of the seven the boys would otherwise play) if one team is ahead by 10 runs or more.

And they lost by slaughter Monday night, too.

In fact, after Monday's debacle, the coach took the team out into the outfield to run -- a punishment -- and he yelled at them so loudly that the parents, hovering nervously at the foul line, could hear. Long Suffering Spouse and I could hear him, too, and we'd walked halfway back to the car.

The parents were upset. Now, this is not a rant against the team parents. I suppose I was pretty harsh on them in my recent essay on their treatment of the Amish Umpire, but these are not bad parents. It's just... well, they're not sports parents. They're not used to coaches yelling at their kids.

But that's what coaches do. If they didn't yell, the kids would think they didn't care. Even I yelled from time to time (OK, I howled in incoherent anguish) -- and I was a terrible coach.

I don't think the Raptors' parents are dumb; they'll eventually figure out that you have to yell at kids, especially at young teenage boys, if you have any hopes of commanding their attention. But they were offended Monday night.

And, by Wednesday, they were fatalistic. One parent said we should change our name to the Livestock because we know so well what it means to get slaughtered.

It's an ugly, ugly mood on the club right now. I wrote last summer about Coach Earring and the game we won by forfeit and the mood wasn't as gloomy among those Bluejay Park Reds as it is on the Raptors now.

This is supposed to be travel baseball. It's supposed to be a big step up from a recreational league like we had at Bluejay Park. At Bluejay Park, we took everybody who wanted to play, regardless of talent. Or attitude. And everybody was supposed to play three innings no matter what (and on my teams they actually did). You have to try out for a travel team. You have to be picked.

Even so, right now I think my Bluejay Park Reds could whomp the Raptors... no matter which team Youngest Son played for.

And the Raptors just go through the motions. They botch routine plays. They don't run hard on ground balls. They don't ever take the extra base. A lot of them just shuffle and galumph to their positions on the field -- the kids on other teams run... or at least jog. For the most part, the Raptors look lackadaisical, even disinterested. And no one gets benched.

This is quite different from our experience when Middle Son played travel ball, five or six years ago.

We drove several hundred miles, to Ohio, to see one of Middle Son's travel ball games. Actually, we had to go -- because the bus that took the team through Northern Virginia and up into Pennsylvania and then to Ohio wasn't coming back to Illinois. (That team really traveled.)

So we'd driven a long way to see Middle Son's game. And we got there with the game already in progress. Middle Son was standing on second base with two outs... and he didn't move on contact. I don't remember the exact situation; I think the batter got a hit and Middle Son failed to score. The coach called time and asked Middle Son if he knew how many outs there were.

Clearly, he did not know... and he was obliged to admit it.

The coach pulled him out of the game and he sat the rest of the night.

That may seem harsh -- and we weren't thrilled, obviously -- but it was the right thing to do. Middle Son learned a lesson about keeping his head in the game.

The Raptors coach hasn't been able to sit anyone the last couple of weeks, even if he wanted to, because he's only had nine kids for most games. But I don't think he wants to -- because he doesn't want to take flak from the other parents. In fact, as I've written before, I think he took a smaller roster into the season just so no one (meaning no parent) could complain about playing time.

I feel terrible for our coach at this point. He's clearly exasperated: Monday, even as he was yelling at the kids, he was pacing further and further away from them. He was setting out the distance they'd have to run, yes, but his whole demeanor suggested that he was too angry and frustrated to stand anywhere near them. This coach -- and his assistants -- have sacrificed an incredible amount of time for games and practices... and their efforts are not bearing fruit.

I want to offer words of comfort or support -- but the coach doesn't know me. Not like he knows the other parents... his social friends... who are still mad at him for yelling at their precious babies. I think he's a little skittish about parents generally right now: At a recent game, after retrieving up a long foul ball, I walked it back to the bench so the coaches could give it back to the umpire -- and I swear the poor man cringed, until I made clear the innocuous purpose of my very brief visit.

I never had trouble with parents when I was coaching, but I know something about losing. Actually, I know a whole lot about losing. So -- and here's the Dr. Phil-type question, if you're still with me -- what, if anything, should I say to show support for the poor guy?