The games my father can't see (I think)

Baxter at bat in his first game.

My father would have loved it. This was my grandson, Baxter’s, first year that he could play Little League baseball in his 6-year-old life. In his first game, he got two hits. He got a couple of hits in every game. At that age, if you can ever hit the ball, you’ll get a hit, because the ball will never get to the base before you do.

And he scored a couple of runs in just about every game, because, at that age, if you get on base, and a couple of other kids hit the ball (and it never gets to the base before they do), you will eventually come around to score. When I was the third-base coach for my son, Dan’s, Little League teams, I just waved every base runner home, every time someone hit the ball. I noticed that the coaches on my grandchildren’s teams were much nicer people than I am, and didn’t do that.

Baxter played in a Cleveland Heights-sponsored league of coach-pitch teams—where the coach of the team that’s batting pitches to her or his own players. (Baxter’s mother, Cassie, was his team’s coach.) But the coach, while pitching, doesn’t field any balls. The kids do that. (Or not.) All the games are high-scoring, on both sides. The kids usually don’t know who won the games, and they don’t care. They have fun playing.

And the parents and grandparents have fun watching the games. (Or not watching.) I do watch the games. Some of the spectators watch for a while. But it’s hard to stay focused on the game, with each batter getting a lot of strikes and a lot of chances to hit the ball. But as grandparents, my wife and I don’t know as many of the parents as the parent-generation does.

Baxter’s 9-year-old sister, Westin, played on a team as well. There was an incredible difference between her team’s level of play and that of Baxter’s, just two or three years younger. Her team comprised kids she’s known and played sports with and gone to school with for four years. Both kids also swim with the Heights Tigersharks team—operated by their father, Dan—along with a lot of these same kids.

The games had a very Cleveland Heights flavor, with teams made up of kids who were White, Black, Asian, and more, and from Christian, Muslim, Orthodox Jewish and other cultures, all playing together; and with spectators all socializing, quietly, in the stands or in their own camping chairs. The Cleveland Heights supervisor of youth sports, facility rentals and camps, Mike Discenzo, if he saw us walking from the Forest Hill Park parking lot toward the baseball fields with our chairs, would point and tell us, “They’re on Field 6, over there,” lending the scenario a real, old-fashioned, small-town feeling.

If my father were alive . . . well, he’d be 103, and probably wouldn’t have been able to go to the games. But if he were alive, and younger, and able to go, he would have loved seeing his great-grandchildren play baseball. He had died by the time Dan started playing Little League baseball, so he never got to see that.

Baseball was just about the only thing I ever talked about with my father. Sometimes music. But his music, not mine. I learned a lot about big-band and swing music and musicians, which was fine. He had wanted, and started out, to become a musician, but World War II put an end to that dream. And others.

He and I never had a good relationship. Just the opposite, in fact. But he and my son had a great one, but only till Dan was 5, when my father died. As I watched Baxter’s and Westin’s games, I sometimes thought about things I would have said to him about the games, and not just how much my father would have loved the games, and Baxter and Westin. He loved being a grandfather, for the relatively short time he was one. That was another subject we could talk about, the grandchildren. My two brothers also had kids, but mine were the only ones in town, till after he died.

My father died on the same day that Major League Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti convinced Pete Rose to agree to a lifetime ban from baseball. So, I don’t know where my father would have stood on that issue. But then Giamatti also died, suddenly, one week later. So, if there’s an afterlife, maybe they got to discuss it. I don’t believe in any kind of afterlife, so I’m not one of those who say, “I’m sure he was watching Baxter’s or Westin’s game.”

But, of course, no one really knows what happens. In the meantime, I’m now the grandfather, and I’m watching their games.