Chasing the Baseball Dream 101

I’ve watched 5 little boys of my own…. dreaming and scheming all things baseball! I’ve witnessed 3 generations of baseball dreaming and scheming. I’m watching the next generation take their first baseball babysteps as they imitate their daddy.

Two of my little dreamers and schemers aren’t so little anymore, but they still dream baseball. They may have retired their major league dreams, but the love of the game is still as strong as ever. At this very moment, one of them is trying to recover from a heartbreaking knee injury. He is recuperating from extensive knee repair surgery with one goal in mind... to get back on the ball field.

I’ll give you a glimpse into our lives as a ‘baseball family’. There are millions of us out there, and no two are the same… but we do have one thing in common…. the dream!

What do we do most Friday nights… from late February until November?

We go through a uniform bag, a bat bag (housing his new Combat bats, a wooden bat, a couple of balls, batting gloves, sunflower seeds, bubble gum, handwarmers, helmet and gatorade), pack a picnic basket and a cooler full of snacks. After all, our little ballplayer has to arrive most Saturdays by 8 am at a ballfield somewhere. Some games are planned several weeks or months in advance, but others we may not know about until we get ‘that’ call.

It takes a lot of planning to make this work, week after week… year after year. You can’t wake up on Saturday morning not knowing which team he’s playing for, which uniform he needs or where it might be. It’s a necessity to have the equipment ready. We have a system to keep up with everything… and I mean everything. Still, upon occasion, we blow it… and have to search high and low for the right cleats or a missing ball glove.

Food is the next thing we have to plan. This is a big deal for us, since we usually travel with 2 adults and 7 children. Eating concession stand food or MickeyDs all weekend would break the bank. We have 2 coolers for liquid beverages… which include 1 filled with bottled waters. The other cooler has Gatorades, juices, fresh fruit sliced into containers and liquid yogurts. For snacks we carry cheese, wheat crackers, beef jerky, peanut butter, whole wheat bread, and sometimes deli meat. I sometimes make homemade bread for our excursions and add homemade chicken salad made with cream cheese instead of mayonnaise. I take enough food to feed an army (or at least a ball team).

One other thing has to be taken into account before we leave the house at 6 am on Saturday morning. The weather! Nine times out of 10, the baseball family will be playing baseball in spite of the elements. So you need to go prepared! We keep a quilt, jackets, hand and feet warmers (the kind in the little plastic pouches), extra clothes (especially something to change into in case the temperatures change… we learned this the hard way a couple of times), and our canopy tent in our van at all times. The uniform bag stays in the van as well… it always has extra uniforms, underarmor, cleats, socks and long johns. Then everyone grabs their USSSA hoodies on the way out the door.

The all important item that has to arrive with us at the field is the pitch counter.

Ooops… I forgot the most important aspect of our packing to go to the field… the player. He has to be awakened in the wee hours of the morning. He has to be coerced into eating something somewhat nutritious… not so easy in the early hours of the morning. All of this is pretty easy with our current baseball player, since he counts the days until the weekends and his next tournament. He wakes up ready to go!

Grab the coolers! and don’t forget the pitch counter!