My dad was a pitcher himself. But he recognized me as a catcher pretty early on. Actually, the reason I started catching was the earliest days of LL. We didn’t have t-ball, we threw to each other from the start. Because my dad had played catch with me, I was about the only kid at that age who could catch the ball consistently. And that’s where I pretty much stayed.
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Good story. My dad insisted on control. I threw to him a million times in the back yard. He would hold his glove in one spot until I hit it, then he would move it to another spot. The control I had/he developed was a main reason I was able to play college baseball.
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My dad caught my throwing a lot too, but I never pitched past about 10 years old.
Another funny story…he coached my niece, his granddaughter, when she started playing softball. Only by that time, he couldn’t squat any more, and brought a little camp stool out to sit on when catching her. One day, my niece told him she was embarrassed by his sitting on a chair. So she brought him a ball bucket to sit on. That made her very happy. She explained that one looks much more like a baseball coach sitting on a plastic bucket.
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My dad used to burn me out when I was a kid. I would tell him he was throwing too hard, and he would laugh and burn another one in.
Boy, did I get even. He was still catching me when I was at UT, and the tables were turned. He’d tell me to ease up a little, and I’d laugh and burn another one in.
My dad would throw batting practice to us, and once in a while a kid would get cocky. He’d either throw one past them or throw a split finger (he called it a forkball) that rolled off the table, just to make them look silly. But I never got much revenge on him.
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Elroy Face=forkball
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I’m sure I’ve responded to your story before, but my situation was the same. When I was I guess 7 we started kid pitch which seems crazy now, but that’s what we did. I was on the Owls, which was a team roughly as successful as its college football namesake. Sammy Porter and I were the only two dudes on the team that could throw and catch, so he became the pitcher and I the catcher.
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It was pretty good. Catching him, it look like it was over your head coming in, them it hit you in the foot. I swear it simply stopped and fell about a foot in front of the plate.
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Yep. We started kid pitch right away. We did have a tee though, as we didn’t have walks at first. If you got four balls, they brought out the tee. Which didn’t happen as often as one might think. Probably only four or five times per game. At seven, we were hacking, Jose Altuve style.
Yeah, basically we were all Altuve, all the time, which meant that either the kid was up there hacking at everything or he was simply not going to swing the bat no matter what no matter what.
We also put an actual hard crease in the bill of our hats, and since we were 7, it was never exactly in the center. I imagine there were some OCD parents who were traumatized.
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Fun trip down memory lane last night.
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It was. I love talking baseball with my dad (and you) and we still talk about it often, especially the days when he was coaching me as a kid. Those were some great times.
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Back at you re talking baseball. Coaching my son and helping him learn the game was special for me, in no small part because Mark treated me like his coach, not his dad, during practices and at games. Watching games with him is like watching with you: y’all understand the game and its nuances, and the baseball conversation is at a high level for me.
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Have to ask. Did he get 81 candles? If so, how many more?
81 will come next September.
(TLTP) = too late to post…
(After a good nights sleep) Thankful he’s still around for you to enjoy each other.