Out In Right Field

It was sometime during the fog of COVID that my youngest daughter announced her intention to play baseball. Darcy joined a coed Catholic Youth Organization team in the spring of 2021 and the following year she started playing catcher when no one else wanted to wear the bulky equipment during the hot afternoon games. She transitioned to softball the year after that, but when not enough girls signed up the following year to field a full team, Darcy switched over to the Alamo Heights Little League. 

Regardless of the league, one characteristic shared by all of the teams my daughter played on was that none of them were very good. During those first four seasons, they won less than four games. And while Darcy would freely acknowledge that winning is, in fact, more fun than losing, she enjoyed playing the game regardless of its outcome. She continued to cultivate her catching skills and became increasingly good at stopping what, at her age, were still often wild and unpredictable pitches. She enjoyed being at the center of the action and saw how her individual effort contributed to the team as a whole. That team might rarely achieve the implied goal of winning, but that was beside the point.

In the spring of 2025, Darcy aged into the "majors" division of the Alamo Heights Little League. After formal tryouts in late January, she found herself placed on a team that included several girls of notable talent. The head coach's daughter was able to stretch out and catch any ball thrown remotely in the direction of first base. The daughter of one of the other coach's was an incredibly strong pitcher whose poise and consistency would result in short half-innings as she struck out batter after batter. This pitcher was paired with the daughter of the third base coach who was an equally formidable catcher with an arm capable of throwing out runners attempting to steal second base.

In her first few weeks with this new team, Darcy experienced more wins than she had in all of her previous seasons combined. To her credit, she acknowledged and accepted that the daughter of the third base coach was a more skilled catcher and, as she was a good head taller, could reach pitches my daughter physically could not. That said, my diminutive daughter still wanted to do her part and be ready to jump in should the need arrive. But as team practices began in earnest, it quickly became apparent that the years she spent behind the plate had resulted in her fielding skills falling behind those of some of her teammates. Intuiting the path of fly balls, for example, proved to be particularly vexing during early practices. That said, she seemed to be holding her own during games. Yes, she would sometimes strike out, but she would get on base just as often. Yes, she would occasionally mishandle the fielding of a ball, but she certainly wasn't the only one to do so. She seemed to be doing a respectable job playing third base where she would offer a friendly fist bump to any runner on the opposing team who made it to the base she was in charge of protecting. 

By the middle of the season, however, Darcy's feelings towards her new team began to grow more complicated. Yes, it felt good to be on a “winning” team, but the novelty of that waned as she began to sense she wasn't contributing to those wins. This was reinforced by the fact that she had been moved to last in the batting order and had been relegated to right field. 

I use the term, "relegated" because, as most right-handed hitters tend to hit towards left field, coaches tend to park their weaker players in right field. I know all this because, in my youth, coaches parked me in right field as well.

* * *

Any discussion of kids and team sports invariably dissolves into a discussion of parents and team sports, and so this is where I insert myself into the narrative. For context, my baseball career was limited to a couple of seasons of t-ball and coach-pitch before I formally announced my retirement. My performance during those brief seasons could best be described as "uninspired." The same could also be said of all the other sports I tried including a season of soccer (before it was cool), a season of basketball (where I never attempted a shot), and a season of junior high football (that I'd rather not talk about).

I could blame childhood asthma for my pervasive lack of success in sports, but the reality is that I am not currently - nor have I ever been - particularly athletic. I possessed a general lack of coordination combined with a gross inability to throw or catch a ball with any degree of accuracy. Compounding this was the fact that my older brother was a gifted athlete. He was a starting pitcher on his varsity high school baseball team and played a bit college ball at TCU.

I would come to appreciate the experience of working with others towards a common goal when I performed in my high school theater productions. Of course, a notable difference between a musical production of Brigadoon and a playoff game of baseball is that the latter event ends with one team emerging victorious from the field of play having defeated the other team. The former ends with everyone joining a hands and bowing whilst wearing stage makeup. A high school musical production also includes considerably more singing and dancing (and in the specific case of Brigadoon, a significantly greater number of boys wearing skirts).

As I entered adulthood, I would occasionally be reminded of the specific athletic skills I never developed as a child. For example, my limited throwing and catching abilities would be on full display when a group of my fellow graduate students and I would take a break from studio to play catch in a nearby quad (despite Princeton University's Graduate School of Architecture never being known for its fielding prowess).  Still, I had no regrets.

I even came to appreciate my lack of experience as a net positive in Darcy’s first few years years playing baseball and softball. I was able to enjoy all she was able to achieve on her own without comparing them - consciously or not - to my own accomplishments because (as mentioned earlier) I had none. Like any parent, I would be nervous when it was her turn to bat, but I felt no urge to yell out "Keep your eye on the ball!" or "Guard the plate!" or any other well-intentioned but useless-in-the-moment platitudes shouted at terrified batters by their parents. Yes, I wanted her to get a hit (or make a play or whatever) but that wasn't because I would somehow value her less if she didn't: it was because I knew she would feel better about herself if she did. I knew she would have more fun if she did. It should be noted that I also didn't care if her team won or lost. If anything, I saw there being value in learning to enjoy a pursuit - be it catching a 12" yellow ball or reciting lines in a middling Scottish accent - even if you aren't all that good at it. I told my daughter on more than one occasion that if there came a point where she wasn't enjoying softball, she was under no obligation to continue playing. She could finish out the season and then move on to something else.

* * *

It was sometime in late March when it became obvious Darcy wasn't enjoying softball. It was around this time the rigor and frequency of early practices began to diminish (by the end of the season, over half of the scheduled practices had not occurred). It was also around this time that it became apparent that some players were receiving more of the coaches’ attention than others. There was one episode at the batting cages where the coach repeatedly skipped over my daughter, telling her she needed to "break-in" her new bat. I freely acknowledge a general ignorance of strategies and techniques related to advanced softball gameplay, but I know there is no such thing as "breaking-in" metal alloy. Yes, it is generally accepted that the carbon fibers of high-end composite bats need to be loosened for them to reach their full power-transfer potential, but my daughter's bat was aluminum. It also wasn't new.

At another point in the season, Darcy asked if she was ever going to have a turn as catcher. The coach responded with a question of his own: "Do you want to be the catcher, or do you want to win the game?"

An unexpected downside of being on a “winning” team is the importance gets placed on winning. Prioritizing certain players while minimizing the participation of others might be an effective strategy for winning games in the short term, but it limits the growth of the the team as a whole. It also squeezes all the joy out of the game for those who just want to play it. 

“I know we’re winning a lot this season,” Darcy said on the way home after winning a game one night. “But I had a lot more fun when last year when we were losing.” In previous (losing) seasons, my daughter felt she was contributing. In this (winning) season, it had been decided she had little value and so she had been cast out into right field.  

When it became apparent that my daughter would be spending the remainder of the season in the outfield (and after concluding the skills she would need to be an effective outfielder would not be taught in practice) we decided the best course of action was to take things into our own hands. Even if I never personally learned how to catch a fly ball as a child, YouTube now exists. At bedtime we would watch videos about the topic and strategized about how to recreate the drills recommended by the capable-seeming on-air talent. We would go to a park on Saturday mornings - she with a softball glove and I with a tennis racket - so that I could lob tennis balls towards her from a hundred feet away so she could get a sense of how to anticipate the flight characteristics of a ball hit into the outfield. We invested in private hitting lessons where some minor tweaks to her swing were made (and where she was allowed to actually practice hitting).

This effort didn’t result in her catching every ball hit in her general direction. Because of a little extra work outside of practice in the waning weeks of the season, she didn’t start hitting homers every time she went up to the plate. But it did remind her of the lesson she learned in previous seasons that effort invested in practice results in better performance during games. And she did catch a fly ball hit into the outfield. And in the last game of the season, she did hit a double. Once on base, she would go on to score what would end up being her team’s only run that game.

Darcy’s team lost that last game. They were eliminated from the playoffs and ended up finishing second overall for the season. In other words, despite all the emphasis on winning, they didn’t, strictly speaking, win. But my daughter didn’t care. She was happy. She she had made a difference. She had contributed despite being relegated to the end of the batting order and being located so far from the action out in right field.