#29: There’s No Crying in Baseball!

No crying 66


In the movie ‘A League of Their Own’ Tom Hanks is the manager of a woman’s professional baseball team during the war years in the 1940’s.
In one famous scene he really chews out one of his players for making a stupid mistake on the field and she begins to sob.
Hanks sees her weeping and asks, incredulously, “Are you crying?”
Between sniffles, the girl shakes her head and weakly says, “No,” but continues to breakdown with tears streaming down her cheeks.
The manager can’t believe what he’s seeing and yells, “Are you crying? Are you crying? There’s no cryin!… There’s no crying in baseball!”
Well, that was then… and this is now.
My brother Jay is managing a minor league Little League team of nine and ten year old boys.
I went to a game and watched a kid step up to the plate.
He had the eye-black smeared under his eyes, just like the pros… even though the sun wasn’t out and it was overcast and gray.
He was wearing not one, but two, batting gloves.
He knocked the dirt out of his cleats with his bat, then flipped the bat around like some major league ballplayer that he watched on the TV and was obviously mimicking.
He was also wearing a massive, protective batting helmet with a formidable steel cage on the front that looked like a hockey goalie’s mask, even though the pitchers could barely reach the plate from the mound with their weak, little spaghetti arms.
The pitcher awkwardly wound up and delivered the pitch.
The baseball moped lethargically towards home plate and gently plunked the batter in the arm.
The kid collapsed to the ground in agony, began bawling his eyes out, and had to be helped off the field, coming out of the game.
He continued to cry uncontrollably on the bench until his mother came out of the stands and went into the dugout to console him and give him a hug.
While the game was still in progress, and his teammates were out on the field, his parents took him home with a big ice-pack on his arm as his mother held his hand with a look of grave concern on her face.
I was horrified, seeing how coddled and pampered kids are these days.
I have news for you. If my mother had ever come into my team’s dugout to hug me, I would have had to quit baseball forever, right there and then, because I could never, ever face my friends again.
Given the way that people are raising their children in this day and age, is it really a mystery why there are now grown men who are fighting for the right to use the Ladies’ Restroom?