Most of the time the “moral of the story” comes at the end. This time we’ll start with it. The moral of this story is: Dads, never schedule kids’ baseball games on Mother’s Day.
If you live around here, you know that the cold and rainy weather doesn’t start to let up until around mid-May, which just so happens to be the same time as Mother’s Day. If you are a manager, a coach, a league official, an umpire, or a parent, you also know that Sundays are the best days to get those games in. Over the course of a season, rainouts, postponements, and rescheduled games add up.
To end the season with most teams playing the requisite number of games and reliable standings before the playoffs, you’ve got to get those games in. Now, having said all of this, that’s the dads’ side of the story, and as you can tell, it’s factual and correct, but it’s also a non-starter.
Why? Because today is Mother’s Day, and when it comes to church league Little League and T-ball, you never, ever schedule kids’ games on Mother’s Day.
It all started innocently enough. The church league schedules came out in March. Dads were grooming muddy, cold fields in between the few snowy days left in the winter season. The “dad-ball” coaches were doing everything they could to get the little darlings ready for the nicer weather. Sometimes that meant using asphalt parking lots and indoor gyms, if you could find one that was available and if you “knew a guy.”
No one even noticed that a full slate of T-ball games was scheduled for that off-limits Sunday in May. The annual father-and-son rite of spring carried on as usual. Uniforms were handed out, and soon enough all those future Major League Baseball All-Stars were hitting the field.
Dad coaches made sure the T-ballers had their gloves on and that at least most of them were standing instead of sitting in the grass when the ball was pitched by the coach-dad. Parents lined the empty spaces and the little hill just outside the foul lines on first and third base, coolers packed, Juicy Juice boxes at the ready, sitting in those ubiquitous umbrella folding chairs.
Aside from the occasional barking at each other that coaches would sometimes do, and the barking at the coaches that the mothers would sometimes do, and the barking at each other that moms and dads and kids would sometimes do, it was an impeccable season right up until that Sunday in May.
About four days before Mother’s Day is when panic set in, which quickly turned into collective outrage on the part of every mom with a kid in the T-ball league. That outrage then created what led to a full-blown crisis for the league, which from then on was simply known in the church league as “The Mother’s Day Fiasco.”
Something had to be done, and done now. Every mother of every child in that league had just discovered that the dads had scheduled all of those kids to be on that field on Mother’s Day — their day. That meant they had to be at that field. That meant they were most likely the ones getting those kids dressed in clean uniforms on their day, of all days. That likely meant they had to schlep those kids to the field with coolers full of Juicy Juice boxes. That meant they had to go through another round of “Where’s your mouth guard?” before heading out the door to the field.
No way. “I’m getting my brunch. I’m drinking my mimosa on my day — Mother’s Day — if it’s the last thing I do! There will be no baseball on Mother’s Day,” the moms said in unison.
As you might expect, the moms made themselves very clear on this issue. Also, as you might expect, not all dads are good at taking a hint, even if that hint comes with the same subtlety as a Mike Tyson right hook to the face.
The T-ball league commissioner, who it must be noted was new to the job, wasn’t having it. It also must be noted that his T-ball-aged son was his oldest, so he had no experience or empirical knowledge of God’s Eleventh Commandment, which legend has it was handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai and says, “Thou shall not have any organized kids’ activities on Mother’s Day, especially T-ball.”
The poor guy resisted the pressure and issued an ill-advised email to all parents, including his own wife, rationally explaining the situation in terms of mathematics, the uncertainty of weather, the limited number of weekends in a given T-ball season, and the need to get those games in before June 30, the last day of the regular season.
Rumor had it that his wife kicked him out of the house and into the garage. She wanted her mimosa on Mother’s Day, too. The other mothers initially led a push to impeach the league commissioner until they realized that if he was out, one of them or their husbands would have to do that job, and that wasn’t about to happen.
And so, by Friday evening before Mother’s Day, the league commissioner issued another digital missive to the parental masses in the church league’s T-ball division. It went like this:
There appears to have been some confusion over the church league’s scheduling of T-ball games on Mother’s Day. This was an oversight that will not happen again. All games that were scheduled for this Sunday will be treated as rainouts and will be made up during the course of the season. Our apologies for the mix-up. We’ll do better next time. Meanwhile to all our church league moms, Happy Mother’s Day!
And so there was a happy ending. The moms in the church league did get to have their Mother’s Day brunches, or whatever it was they wanted on that day (at least as far as I know). And a crisis was averted for most everyone, I think.
I’m told the commissioner’s wife made the church league T-ball commissioner pay dearly for that one. And more than a few dad-ball coaches and managers were sent to Chinese-style reeducation camps, where they learned the art of buying flowers, gold, and diamonds. The only thing that didn’t take was the workshop at the reeducation camp called, “The Art of Listening to Your Wife.”
Not that you were wondering, but for the sake of full disclosure, I was not that commissioner. But here’s where I fit into all of this as the manager of one of those teams: that’s when I learned how much my wife likes yellow roses.
And so today, if you happen to be a mom, please know that from the bottom of our hearts at the church league, Happy Mother’s Day!
