For lots of reasons, my wife and I loved having our boys play machine pitch baseball in the American Fork Baseball League. It was a step above the local rec leagues, and it allowed our boys, who were all two years apart from each other, to play together.
In this particular baseball story, I’m going to tell you about a story that illustrates how even leagues for young kids can quickly become competitive, and can cause the adult parents and coaches to become a little territorial. This is a story about two undefeated teams, the Red Sox (on which two of my sons played) and the White Sox (our rival). It happened in 2018, when my 14-year old was 8, and my 11-year-old was five, almost too young to play in this American Fork Baseball 6-8 year old machine pitch league.
This kind of story is likely a familiar one for almost all parents and coaches of young baseball players.
You have seen this situation. It happens a lot.
Kids in baseball leagues have older brothers. Often those brothers have played in the league themselves. Now that they’ve aged out, they come back. This time as umpires.
When an older brother is umpiring a game, there is sure to be bias. It’s human nature.
I saw this happen just a couple months ago in my son’s team’s favor, where his older brother was hired by the local rec league and ended up umpiring several of our games. If the other team knew that the umpire was the brother of one of our players, some of the calls would have made a lot more sense to them. There’s almost an unwritten rule than an older brother never gives a called third strike to his younger sibling.
The White Sox were a team that “somehow” always managed to get the all-star kids. Their coach was the husband of the woman who ran the league for the previous twelve years. Although there was a draft each year that was supposed to make the playing field somewhat level, the White Sox always seemed to fare well above the other teams who were picking among the kids who showed up at tryouts. Coaches got to watch them hit five pitches, throw and catch with other kids, and do some running. Then they’d go spend the evening taking turns choosing their team.
But the White Sox usually had some sort of “friend” or “neighborhood” exception. That made them always hard to beat.
In addition to their advantage in the draft and knowing how to work the system, the White Sox also had the privilege of the purse. The umpires were paid by same person who sat with and cheered on the White Sox at every one of their games.
You can see where this is going.
The 2018 American Fork Baseball Red Sox weren’t supposed to be one of the top teams in the league, but the baseball gods must have had something else in mind. My wife and I were on an anniversary trip during tryouts, so my 8-year-old son, Stephen, missed the whole thing, having opted to go to a travel tournament with his older brother and his granddad. That meant that when the draft came, none of the other coaches knew how good a player Stephen was…except for one.
One of my high school teammates happened to be coaching his three sons, two of whom (twins) were 8-year-olds. During the draft, he recognized the name “Robbins” associated with two of kids who were still available lower in the draft. He picked them up, hoping that they were my boys. I got a text message from him telling me that he thought he had drafted my boys and asking me to confirm that’s who they were.
He was right. Between my boys and his, we had the second most talented group of kids in the league, behind the White Sox, of course.
Almost the entire season had passed when we were finally scheduled to play the White Sox. Both teams were undefeated, having won something like eight games already.
I didn’t realize how big a deal the game would be to our coaches. While I helped them run practices and worked a lot with the kids, I wasn’t officially one of the coaches, and I didn’t make the major decisions for the team.
As time for the game approached, our assistant coach let me know that the umpire scheduled for the game was the older brother of one of the White Sox players. He asked if I would be available to umpire instead. I thought he was joking, but I found out we went through warm-ups and then had the coaches’ meeting just before the game that he was indeed serious.
As we met to review the rules and make sure everyone was on the same page, our assistant coach told the White Sox head coach that he wasn’t comfortable with an older brother of one of his players being the umpire for the game. Wow, did that set off an uncomfortable discussion of how the White Sox did things and how they couldn’t be trusted to be fair.
So there I was, one of the most intense dads in the league, like a deer in the headlights being asked to umpire a game between the White Sox and my own Red Sox. I agreed. I was made the head umpire, and the older brother of the White Sox player was sent to umpire in the field.
I tried to be as objective as possible, even calling a White Sox kid safe when a force out throw home to my son, the five-year-old catcher, ended up in a great defensive play. The runner’s foot hit the plate right at the same time my son caught the ball. My instincts as an umpire overcame the instincts that told me I’d be in trouble with my wife that night for taking away my boy’s hard earned out, which turned out to be a critical part of a narrow loss our Red Sox had to the White Sox.
