The T-ball comedy show

One of my grandsons is a T-baller.  It so happens that, due to a freak birthday situation, he is now in his third year of T-ball, and evidently most of the rest of the team are rookies, meaning that they have to be told which direction to  run on the basepaths and every move to make in the field. (There is a five run limit, and the team generally wins who can prevent the other team from getting all five runs in one of the innings.) Because of his relative experience, Ryan plays pitcher, which means he fields the lion's share of the balls that are hit. In fact, one slow trickler rolled between third and short, both of which players watched the ball with dazed fascination, and Ryan had to chase it down in left field (the back side of the infield dirt) and run the ball back to the pitcher's circle, which forces the runners to stop.

Ryan is a happy lad, who generally has a wide grin on his face. He likes to play ball, so he grins the whole time he is on the field. The players are prevented from tagging the runner out if he is more than halfway to first, thus forcing them to throw and catch the ball. (The catching part rarely happens.) This means that the main part of the defensive strategy begins when runners are on first and second. Then the pitcher can field the ball and possibly beat the runner to third base, or likewise to home if the bases are loaded. So, at this point in the inning, the coach will yell instructions to Ryan to field the ball and run to the appropriate base. Ryan (still grinning, of course), will acknowledge the coach's instructions with a confident thumbs-up sign.

A colleague of mine once told me that when he coached his son in T-ball, the only way the kids knew if they had won or lost was if he bought them a big sno-cone or a small sno-cone. I suspect it is much the same in this league. Baseball awareness is a slow process. I  remember a few years ago watching a little girl (who was slowly jogging from first to second after a ball had been hit) stop and engage in a pleasant conversation with the girl playing second base, evidently because the other girl had said something complimentary about her fashionable shoes, and that was  of vastly greater importance than any ballgame.