Child's play

They're playing baseball this fine June morning, on the rough diamond just south of Arlington Elementary school. A kid no bigger than a minute stands at the plate. The bat on his shoulder looks like a redwood. Cries of "Hey, battah, hey, battah" rise into the clear air from other tiny figures scattered around the infield like baseball miniatures.

Out on the pitcher's mound, or actually in front of it, Coach leans over and lobs the ball. No Bigger Than Minute swipes at it with the redwood. Ball hits bat, rises lazily and briefly, dribbles out toward second base, where one of the baseball miniatures surrounds it carefully, scoops it up and heaves it wildly.

The ball goes sailing off to parts unknown. The batter pelts madly toward first. "Safe!" another coach hollers.

Scattered applause from the camp chairs on the sidewalk beyond the first baseline, where the parents watching their children take part in this local ritual known as Wildcat baseball.

Where everyone gets to play, and the teams are named after car models and candy brands and major league players and animals, and no one labors under the delusion this is the major leagues or anything like them. Which is why there are remarkably few parents hitting each other in the face at Wildcat games.

Unlike, you know, these brainiacs.

By now everyone in America has seen this, because it's gone viral several times over since it was recorded this week. The spectacle of alleged grownups behaving like 7-year-olds at a baseball game played by actual 7-year-olds is just one more not-so-subtle reminder that the worst part of kid sports are parents, because parents are frequently morons. Acknowledging this is probably why so few of them ever get punished by the law.

Which is a shame, because the Blob tends to think if the brawlers got serious jail time every time they felt compelled to slug one another over child's play, the world would be a better place. And the next bunch of morons might think twice about it.

Or not, of course. They are, after all, morons.

You can label that name-calling if you like, but the Blob believes it's simply accurate reporting. How else are you going to describe people who get so upset over the call of a 13-year-old umpire in a kid baseball game they feel compelled to start brawling like soccer hooligans?

You want to know why the umpire was 13 years old? Because the players were 7. In other words, that wasn't the next Mike Trout out there getting robbed by a bad call. It was a kid who, when his team's not at bat, is probably standing in the outfield looking for interesting bugs. Or thinking up clever 7-year-old chatter like, "Hey, battah, hey, battah, you couldn't be fattah."

Quick story: Back in my young sportswriting days, I followed around a Little League team in Lapel, In., for a summer feature. A college buddy was the coach. Every inning, when his team came up to bat, one little guy invariably marched up to him and asked "Hey, Coach, when do I bat?"

My buddy would just roll his eyes.

"Fifth," he said. "Same as last inning."

Then he turned to me and grinned.

"Every inning he asks me when he bats," he said. "And every inning I tell him."

So, no, this is not the seventh game of the World Series we're talking about. Although it seems there are always morons who think it is.

It's why the Blob has always half-seriously thought organized sports should be outlawed until a kid is, say, 11 or 12. Until then, let 'em make their own fun.

Let 'em find a vacant lot, lay out a diamond using discarded jackets for bases, and declare everything hit to right an automatic out because there's only five guys on one team and four on the other.

Let 'em use the same vacant lot for a football field; Gilbert from the next block over is all-time center, everyone is eligible, and the defensive guys have to count to 3-Mississippi before they're allowed to rush the quarterback.

Oh, yeah: And no grownups allowed. Because not even Gilbert from the next block over has enough allowance money to bail 'em out.