Rewriting my baseball fan future at Con Ed Field

A new kind of baseball fan is born after learning to love the game for its uncertainty during my son’s last Little League season.

When I was five, in the summer of 1976, I saw bicentennial-flag bunting on the edge of my vision each day, and I started rooting for the New York Yankees because my older sister gave me the scoop that they would keep winning into the future. When I was 50, in the summer of 2022, I cheered longer and louder for my 12-year-old son’s Little League team playing into a future they couldn’t map.

That year, baseball was back. Weddings were back. Yet we who were back often tripped.  Someone had to miss a game due to a positive test. Someone stopped coming to practice, preferring Discord in his room. Still, as I saw Nate in left field and his teammates learn tactics of focus and follow-through, I gained purchase on why to be a fan in the first place. You act as a fan because you, and the players and the other fans, don’t know what will happen — and if you cheer and learn, you can see it through around the next bend.

Before COVID lockdowns, I’d look into baseball’s roiling uncertainty and think:  Strike out a slugger, or whack a home run, just end it!  If you’d seen me root for the New York Mets or earlier teams of Nate’s, you would have seen me grimace when something was in doubt, then gloat when something was resolved.

If you saw me rooting for Nate’s team, the Giants, you’d have seen a skinny guy draping his elbows over a fence behind centerfield, yelling in a steady stream: “”You’ve got this!” “Let’s win this game!” and, eventually, “Let’s be champs!” I used to think the payoff for hours of rooting came when your team pulled off a win. In a year when my son’s team nearly won a title, I learned a fan language that boosts the encouragement that teammates offer each other.

The Giants played on the eastern edge of Manhattan, on a field beneath an electric power plant, at the start of a summer when leaders from Peshawar to London to Seattle told people the only safe places were inside under air conditioning. At our field, that year at least, everybody was outside — buying cheese fries or coffee, digging for umbrellas, keeping eyes on the score. And all the kids on the fields were out, even when they were safe. And it felt as though they were safe even when they were out.

Nate had rough memories of this field. His 2021 team, in his first go-round on this field, created moments of uncertainty — they nearly won a game after losing four straight contests by 15 or more runs, but lost a technicality about the length of a star player’s bat. But such moments came late and left fast. Even after the relief of reclaiming the field from lockdowns, Nate had considered skipping the 2022 season.

When roster spots on his school team went mainly to eighth graders, though, he chose to return. Get some more hacks. Pepper the ball around. And then… Nate, we found out via text chain one weeknight, became a Giant.

As luck had it, it was his first season on a team right in the midst of a title chase — his 2019 team had dominated and enough said about his 2021 team. And it was his first time in the middle of the pack, in terms of skill. Any at-bat, any game outcome arrived cloaked in unknowns. Rooting became a means of finding light in the midst of the tunnel.

I started the season a step behind longtime Peter Stuyvesant families on players’ and coaches’ schools, strengths, and histories. I didn’t hang around at the practices, as I had when Nate was younger. I knew names — coaches Nick and Kevin, teammates Ty and Luke and Ian and Sandy and Leo and Henry and Henry and Tim and Isaac. We could glean the coaches’ sincerity from their frequent emails. One evening my eyes popped when a message from Kevin arrived under the subject banner “Bad News.”

For the past 24 months, such subject lines had signaled that kids’ summer camps were canceled, their schools were padlocked, their relatives on ventilators. In this case, it meant that Kevin had Covid and would step back for a week as a precaution. His son Henry, a pitcher and outfielder with a mop of straw-colored hair, would bat leadoff with a mask.

In the first game against the championship-favorite Mets, a Giant had to leave the game with an injury,  With no spare player, an extra “automatic out” was recorded, and so when the boy before Nate batted in the last of the last inning with three runners on and down by two, we hoped for a rally. But when he grounded out, a ghost of a third out landed on the field, and the Giants had to come back another day.

I heard myself counseling Nate on the outfield grass after the game that the team should feel pride in its fight, in its willingness to stay with each at-bat. A dad from the winning team agreed beside me. Nate wasn’t buying it. They lost the next game 3-2, again with a chance to win in the last at-bat.

This level of Little League suspense felt new to our family. When kids are nine or younger, most of them stand too small to hit the ball or define much of a strike zone between their chests and knees. Games for kids that age rack up walks, and errors, making scores like 23-21 common. By this age, games hang on the same cocoon of luck and patience that define big-league contests. You commonly saw scores like 3-2 or 4-1. Or 6-2 with the bases loaded and one out and Nate on deck.

Being a baseball fan is about more than rooting for wins and losses

Nate talked at the dinner table about the team’s stars and his developing slickness in the field and patience in the batter’s box. Two Giants stood tall, three or four looked shorter than average — including Nate — and many came with limited Little League experience. Yet with Kevin and Nick and resident batting-cage coaches guiding them through swings and steals and slap-the-tag drills, by the third game, they were reliably completing throws to first base in the field and driving hits over the bases onto the grass. The coaches, in comments and drills, showed that cooperation led to surprises, and surprises flowed from perceiving the depth of variables in a moment.

For example, the Giants stole home a lot.  That and tight fielding sparked a series of wins.

Their first started with Nate jogging humbly to left field. His glasses gleamed as he kicked up his feet, but he got few chances to field live balls.  Nate had a key walk and scored a run, backed up every play at third base, and continued to lead the team (if not the league) in cheering.  Our daughter Lizzie, with a day off from dance class, got to see the Giants climb out of a 3-0 hole.

After a lot of deep hits, the game stood at 6-5 in the bottom of the sixth when Ty, whose mom knows my wife from around, roped a double to the corner of left field to score two teammates.

“That’s a fair ball!” I yelled from the fence.

Boys raced around from the dugout. The rejoicing looked less like the jump-and-elbow ritual the major leaguers did. It was hugs, slaps on the back, a lot of mussed hair — gestures of reinforcement. Speaking of holes, the team got to celebrate with donuts as Kevin had promised they would if they caught four fly balls. We had lunch in a park with our daughter, one of her best friends from high school, and that girl’s family. Nate stressed how much running he had done — waking me up to the fact that players run to back up a fielder every time the ball goes into play. It’s true: the pitcher throws, and the second baseman and shortstop slice across to a spot behind the mound. Every time. Do major leaguers do that? Not always.

More practices with Kevin and Nick — and the guys who staff the batting cages at Con Ed Field — led to more runs scored. Nate consistently drew walks and started smacking singles. The team won three straight games — beginning on a Wednesday evening when Nate got to start at third base and got to stand in the batter’s box in his team’s last ups with the game in the balance.

With the Yankees leading 3-2 and runners on first and second, Nate held up his swing for a double steal. With runners now on second and third. Nate swung at a pitch and missed — and dropped his bat, dropped his head and sprinted to first base because the catcher had dropped the ball.

Not everyone knows that the ball stays live when the catcher drops it — but Nate did. The rest of us learned, or remembered, in the span of 50 strides. He stomped down the line and the catcher’s throw to first base went into right field. Nate stepped on the bag and jumped, punching an imaginary pinata. The runners scored, and the Giants held on in the bottom of the inning.

Players walk out after they meet with coaches, along a fence behind first base or third. Tonight, Nate ambled out with his hat off, laughing with a girl who goes to Hebrew school with him and who plays for the Yankees.

“Don’t think you’re the star of the game because you struck out,” she said, ponytail in place and lampblack glistening on her cheeks.

“Oh, I am,” he said. Stars flicker — one can never predict what looks predictable.

The season and spring deepened. I took Nate from one game, in his uniform, to get his Covid booster on a tricked-out bus across town. In later games, I waved off overheard news of revanchist Trumpy rallies elsewhere in the Northeast as I leaned forward on the fence. And I leaned into my cheering role.

I started signaling to Ty’s mom when he struck out a batter by pushing two fingers of my right hand into my left forearm — the kid has ice water in his veins. Nate played two games for the dominant team, the Mets, as a sub for kids who were out sick. His batting stance lengthened. His throws gained precision. Meanwhile, when I followed the major-league Mets — and when Nate and I watched Mets games together —  his eyes still held in trance, like an ancient villager watching a heroes’ parade. I still smiled and sweated at the bendy sliders and the soaring home runs, but now I found it effortless to admire the players for sustaining focus even in a loss.

While the big-league Mets were coasting, the Little League Giants entered a playoff round. They started with a single-elimination contest against the Reds. In that one, our boys staked a 5-0 lead in the second, and saw the other team chip and chip and steal. By the sixth (final) inning, the Reds had tied the game at six each. The commissioner (really, another dad and the Yankees’ coach, a guy named Steve) called the game on account of darkness and told us puzzled parents on the grass that play would resume at 4:30 the next day.

I had been watching with Mickey Yrizzary, the dad of two of the other team’s players. He had been Nate’s coach in 2019 and a fellow Knights dad in 2021. Now he had to figure out how to square this unplanned game with the grade-school graduation scheduled for his son — aka the Reds’ centerfielder — the next day. He said to Nate: “Appel-bomb, we’re enemies now! Deep down I love ya, but we’re so messed up now.”

As we walked off the grass I heard Ian, the Giants’ quiet blue-eyed first baseman tell his parents: “And it was such a great game!” Its greatest dimension, maybe, was that it wasn’t over.

The next day, each team recorded a 1-2-3 inning in the seventh. Then one of the Giants who found his swing over the season, a kid named Leo with longish blonde hair, cued a single to drive in a runner from second base. In the Reds’ last licks, Mickey and I watched quietly. They got a run back, but Giants’ third baseman Tim Cooper tagged out the lead runner to douse a rally. Then the Giants’ offense clicked in the top of the eighth, base hit after bomb after walk after hit, while I talked on the phone with my wife about some logistics involving a surprise fee for our daughter’s learner’s permit. Our boys won 12-7, with Nate rocketing a line drive that missed being a triple by about six feet. They jogged off quietly. Perhaps they had swum in unknowns deep enough that they could breathe.

Beating the Reds moved the Giants into another faceoff with the Dodgers. On a Saturday afternoon, they traded leads all day, and little errors ballooned in a fourth that set the Giants down 7-3. Somehow in the bottom of the fifth, a series of singles and then walks and steals made it  7-6 and then 10-7.

Again, the Dodgers could tie it in their last at-bats. They had runners on first and second with two outs when one of them arced a line drive to the left field gap. I saw the blonde Leo chase the arcing ball under the squinty sky, time his leap, stretch himself to a horizontal line, land the ball in his mitt, and drop it from the force of falling. A runner scored. A dropped ball in the outfield, like a dropped ball falling from the catcher’s mitt, remains live and play continues.

So Nate, who had zoomed from centerfield, picked up the ball in his bare hand, turned on his right foot and threw a straight line to shortstop Luke Marchese, Nick’s son. I saw the ball ride a curve in the air — I never saw Luke throw it, but I saw Ty, playing catcher, drop a tag as another runner tried to score.  The parents (and aunt) in the bleachers whooped. I admit I whooped some stuff about how it was my boy who had executed a key move.

Nate, for his part, ran out with an easy stride. “For you kids watching at home,” he said as he came around the chain-link fence and I ran to pick him up, and we both said: “that’s why you make the relay throw!” Ian’s mom, blonde like him and attentive like him and always focused on the game, smiled and nodded.

I fell into step with Nick, in his gray t-shirt and gray shorts, and told him it was a great game but I had had a minor heart attack. “Minor?” he said in his accent, so the word rhymes with “Dinah.” He put his arm around my shoulders as we walked back toward my sister, my wife and other fans hanging around the picnic tables behind the bleachers. “I was having a major coronary.”

What lifted my pride that day, I told my wife, came from Nate’s steadiness. You can only be as strong or as big or as quick as you are, but anyone can learn to pluck a ball from wet grass with a bare hand, focus on a make-able throw, throw in time, and work with a relay to save a win. Composure 1, Uncertainty 0. Rematch to occur daily.

The next game, on Tuesday evening against the taller and more seasoned Mets, slipped away in the last inning on a series of torched line drives. The next next game, again against the Dodgers, ended on a walk-off walk in extra innings to Giants centerfielder Isaac Goldenberg, who wears number one.

Isaac’s dad and sisters had been regulars in the bleachers but we had never really talked — the girls ran around to the food truck and on the grass, seeming to engage with things other than baseball. On this Thursday night, destiny had Isaac’s dad working late. Rarely a starting pitcher,  Isaac had lasted six innings and then hauled in a deep fly ball during his first inning in center field. Nate, playing left, ran to him as he put the ball away, slapped his back and yelled “let’s go” as they ran to take their turn at bat.

In extra innings, neither team could break through. My wife, our daughter, our daughter’s best friend and I chatted with Isaac’s sister, sitting behind us in the bleachers with her mom on hand for the first time all season, “My knees are shaking,” she said.

The Mets had clinched a spot in the final by this point, so they were hanging out in the bleachers in street clothes, weighing the odds that they would face the Giants or the Dodgers. I kept leaning on the fence with my yells — you’ve got the ball, let’s win this game, come on now — and Mets team members surrounded other fans more and more, handicapping each pitch. It was their cleanup hitter who called “GAME! GAME!” when the final fourth ball landed outside of Isaac’s strike zone.

So the Giants made the championship contest, on June 18. If they win two games, they get the title. If the Mets win one, the Giants settle for silver.

That last day broke sunny, with a light breeze and parental chatter rounding the bleachers. Kevin had made it back from a wedding — weddings were back — and the national anthem played without controversy in a quick pregame ceremony. Well, the Giants romped in the first game and lost the second, 3-0, as fatigue set in a bit. But as Nate pointed out to Nick, they had the tying run at the plate at the very last pitch.

Nate won an award for sportsmanship and heart. He felt no gloom about losing the last game because his teammates had all tried hard and traveled deep. COVID caprice still chilled the ballfield and probably would until after these boys became adults — instead of shaking hands, they withdrew to opposite foul lines and waved their caps. Would shaking hands cause any illness transference? Almost certainly not. Does not shaking hands cause any other harm? We don’t yet know.

For nearly two weeks, skin peeled in sheets off my arms from the sunburn I’d not noticed while I watched the games. They were my relic of the season  — Nate has his uniforms, three “game balls” from the coaches for performance in wins, a runner-up trophy, and the sportsmanship award plaque. Now Nate’s twelve-and-a-half, facing up to seventh grade. He’s got a tee he uses to practice — Nick advised me to get it after the championship game, saying he could go with first the front hand and then the backhand. He will find himself someplace else to play baseball,

Before my memory sets to embellishing or airbrushing, know that these games did happen, The tension of baseball flows from arcs, contact, angles, timing — it’s not all concocted imaginings like chess or instant calculations like basketball. Something occurs – a kid hits a curveball that hangs- and something else happens. Say, another kid can’t just quite get it in his glove.  For one person to succeed, nine others have to fail.

I learned to cheer that uncertainty, sometimes in sunshowers and often in dappled sunlight before bike rides home down Avenue C while Nate listened to the Mets on the radio from a phone in his pocket.

While the season rolled along, dry heat really crept up the California coastline and floods really overwhelmed the Asian plains.  But what a season! To the very last pitch of the last championship game, the Giants could have seen a different outcome. I learned to root for that possibility. And seeing it, shouting into it, helped me learn to root for you, too.