Early Thoughts On Tee-Ball

We are officially a few weeks into the tee-ball season, and I'm finding that we're enjoying the whole experience...especially Scott and Andy, of course.  Despite the back surgery pain and fatigue, Andy is faithfully attending games and, being braver than wimpy Mom, is still able to pitch real tee-balls to help Scott practice.  (There's just something about  the image of a  strongly hit tee-ball screaming to the face or pregnant belly that scares me.  Or maybe it's just that I'm a wimp.  Not quite sure.)

Anyway, after analyzing Scott's amazing team in action quite a lot, I've come up to a conclusion about tee-ball. It is not a regular sport.  It is actually a strange hybrid of three sports...baseball, tackle football, and bowling.

The ball is struck first by a grinning boy who is wearing a helmet far too large for his head/body proportion.  This is usually done after a lot of coachly adjusting, many swing attempts, and lots of pro baseball player pre-swing imitations.  The ball flies taps out into the infield full of players, at which point the sport turns into tackle football.  Nearly all of the fielders (seems to be about everyone except Scott who thinks he's an umpire) runs toward the ball.  Instead of catching or stopping the ball, the natural reaction is to manfully tackle it to get it to stop.  Imagine all twelve, er, eleven boys doing this at once, and you can see where the bowling starts.  Despite their self-sacrificing moves of agility, somehow the ball escapes unscathed while the boys drop like bowling pins.  It brings a whole new meaning to the word 'strike'.  Sometimes the game takes on the feeling of dominoes as well, but only with base runners.  They hardly ever ALL remember to run.  They end up being piled up somewhere around third base where they each in turn hit and knock each other over in a pretty orderly and predictable manner.  Curious.

After all these antics, the game reverts back to being like baseball.  The boys just have to slide home and after scoring, they humbly saunter back to the bench, or out to the stands to jump and see how proud Mom and Dad are of them.  I suppose Joey Votto doesn't really do that, but he probably did once upon a time.

All in all it's been a lot of fun so far.  You almost hate to see them improve in their skills, because it's just so much fun to watch them like this!