Good Night, Bill Lampe....wherever you are...

On Sunday, my wife and I took our 2 year old son to the park. Nothing particularly extraordinary about that. He tends to get up wayyyy too early anyway (at least for my liking), so you gotta do something with him, right?

Turns out this particular kid of ours absolutely loves baseball and has since he was about 9 months old. When he was barely standing on his own he was already swinging a plastic bat around our living room whacking the hell out of anything that remotely looked like a ball.

Now before you get the idea that I’m one of these parents who’s convinced that his kid is the next Tiger Woods or Barry Bonds and that I’m going to sign him up for advanced traveling baseball before he turns 3, no. That’s just not my style. I think kids should be kids for as long as possible before they get buried knee-deep in a world that I tend to think is too competitive and not cooperative enough as it is.

Near as I can tell, the kid just enjoys playing catch and playing bat-uh (= “batter”) and that’s all I need to know. If he’s good at it, swell. If it he’s not, I don’t really care, as long as he has fun doing it.

So, anyhoo, we’re at the park, and we’re playing catch and hitting the ball and running the bases (which for a 2 year old basically means running in any direction you want and in total circles if necessary regardless of where the bases may actually be, just so Daddy doesn’t tag you “out”) when he spots a group of older kids, maybe 12 or so, who’re decked out in the real baseball pants and batting helmets who’ve come to the park to take batting practice with their Dads.

(Note: batting practice doesn’t look anything like it did when I was a kid. Back in those days my Dad would stand on the mound with maybe 2 or 3 ratty looking baseballs and his baseball mitt that looked like something Ty Cobb used and wing balls in my general vicinity. Most of them were too high, too low, too fast or too slow and my recollection is that wayyy too many of them came wayyy too close to hitting me. Not that my Pops was intentionally trying to bean me or anything. He just wasn’t an especially accomplished pitcher. But hey, he tried.

The kids I saw Sunday had a 5 gallon bucket of specially rubber coated baseballs and, wonder of all wonders, a pitching machine! Once Dad number 1 got the machine set up and adjusted correctly, this thing would wing balls in the same spots at a very consistent speed every time. I can certainly see the appeal of this sort of new-fangled gadgetry for both the kid and the Dad, but I gotta wonder if part of the experience isn’t lost if you don’t have to hit the dirt at least once or twice to get out of the way of a high inside fastball from the old man. But, I digress….)

So after my kids spots the older kids, our game of “Batter” is immediately over. He wants to go sit in the bleachers to watch these guys hit. Which is exactly what we end up doing since the 2 year old is actually the one in charge, doncha know.

Pretty much nothing holds my son’s attention like baseball. Actually, let me amend that. NOTHING holds his attention, period. But in relative terms, baseball comes pretty close. So, we sit there and we watch. He cheers and claps when the older kids hit the ball and every once in a while stands up to shout “Dun bay-des!!” (= “Run The Bases!!”….2 year olds don’t get the concept of just practicing hitting the ball….my kid runs out foul tips. Hell, he runs when he misses the ball completely.) and generally has a grand old time.

In between cheering and watching intently and answering his every “Look, Daddy, look”, I actually get into watching these kids practice and thinking some more about my short and not so illustrious baseball career when I was a kid.

I think the first year I played organized baseball was when I was in 3rd grade. How old are you in 3rd grade? 8 maybe? Anyway, I was pretty bad at baseball to start with due most especially to my aversion to getting hit WITH the baseball. Even at the age of 8, I found that to be a fairly reasonable concern. I mean, after all, what normal well-adjusted 8 year old would WANT to get hit with a baseball?

Anyway, before I get too far off the track here, let me just say that I think my batting average that first year was .076. And no, I’m not kidding.

You know why I remember that? Here’s why; my coach was a total jerk. No, seriously, he really was. He made a point at the end of every game to run through the five worst batting averages on the team. Lucky me. Mine was always one of the five worst.

He yelled at kids when they missed balls or missed the cut off man or whatever. He intentionally threw baseballs at us during batting practice. He let his kid pitch every game even though he wasn’t very good. He kicked bats when we struck out (and no one struck out more than me). He swore at us. When we did win, he never took us out for ice cream or anything like that. And he even made fun of the baseball glove I had, which admittedly, wasn’t anything fancy but given my innate lack of interest in getting anywhere near the ball in the first place, I couldn’t see how my choice of gloves was much of an issue, really. We all knew I wasn’t going to catch anything standing way out in right field anyway and if it would’ve been up to me I’d have taken a garbage can lid out there with me to use as a shield over the best ball glove ever made anyway.

I don’t want to belabor the point here, but this guy actually made me HATE baseball. I mean, I would have knots in my stomach before every practice and every game wondering if I was going to be the target of this guy’s abuse today or whether I was going to have suffer through watching someone else be the target.

And looking back, the thing that strikes me as really strange, is that none of the parents of the kids on my team ever said anything to this guy, mine included. I think back in those days all our Dads had probably played for coaches just like this one and figured, “Well, that’s just the way coaches are and I sure don’t have the time to coach the team……and maybe this’ll toughen the kid up…….so…..”

Then, in my second year of little league (and don’t ask me why I decided to play another year after that first one) I played for a guy named Mr. Lampe. I can’t say exactly what he did for a living but unlike other coaches, he seemed to have a lot of time to run practices with us. Maybe he didn’t even have a job? Who knows?

If you remember the movie “The Bad News Bears”, Mr. Lampe was about as close to a real version of Walter Matthau’s character as you could get. He always looked like he had just rolled out of bed and thrown on whatever clothes he found on the floor. His socks usually didn’t match. He had a huge beer belly. His face was sort of oddly shaped and rumpled, like either he had been a boxer at one time, or spent his nights sleeping face down on a hard wood floor. He smoked cigarettes during practice which would certainly be taboo these days. (In fact, he may have even snuck a couple beers down during practices too, but I can’t say for sure.)

And you know what? He was the single best coach I ever had, in any sport, and at any age, all the way up through high school.

He never yelled at us, even when we struck out. He never kicked bats, or swore, or threw baseballs at us. Whenever I struck out, which was still fairly often though not nearly as often as the year before, he’d put his big old arm around my shoulder and say “Don’t you worry, Mikey. You’ll get ‘em next time.”

His son played for our team and he was really, really good. But he didn’t get to pitch every single game and sometimes he had to sit on the bench so some of the other not so good kids could play too. Whenever we won he took us out for ice cream, and paid for it. And at the end of every season, he threw a big party at his house with pizza, and ice cream, and root beer floats, and he even set up empty beer cans in his backyard so we could target practice with his BB Gun.

And he always, always, always made us believe that the way we played the game and the way we interacted with our teammates was infinitely more important than whether we won or lost. He didn’t tolerate better players making fun of weaker ones and he set the perfect example of how we should all treat each other.

I got a lot better playing under Mr. Lampe and even made the All Star Team that year. I’m not sure that my skills had improved that dramatically, though they certainly had, but more importantly, my attitude had changed dramatically. I really believed that Mr. Lampe thought I could be good, or at least better, and I wanted to prove that he was right.

I probably haven’t thought about Little League baseball for 20 years or more now but something about watching those kids with their Dads and their pitching machine took me right back to the dirt field with the track running through the middle of it and that first too small plastic ball glove I had as a kid. Funny how stuff like that happens, isn’t it?

When I interviewed Graham Nash last week in the Mountain Music Room he said something to the effect of , “Do you realize that every single decision we’ve ever made in our lives, no matter how minute, and every single experience we’ve ever had, has led each and every one of us to this exact room, in this exact place at this exact moment in time?”

I think it was more profound when he said it, but you get the idea.

With that in mind, I’m sure some of those amazingly simple but wonderfully important things I learned from Mr. Lampe all those years ago, things like positive reinforcement, and perseverance, and celebrating the differences between us all, probably continue to impact my life today.

Jimmy Durante used to end his television programs with the line “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”

With due apologies to Jimmy….”Good Night, Mr. Lampe, wherever you are. And Thanks.”

Mike Casey