Confessions of a Baseball Blogger

By Renee

And so it begins. The emails from Coach Rinaldi have started to trickle down. No need now to worry about those darn patches on the sleeve at this point.

We’ve tried every folding beach chair in our collection and deemed them all uncomfortable; and we’ve compared bug sprays with no definitive conclusions except that those fan things are just kind of cool.

We’ve eaten a lot of fast food; gotten to know names of the ice cream truck drivers and underwritten the concession stand at Warren for the next year. We can tell a rookie the best place to park in South Plainfield to avoid a foul ball collision, and how to traverse the creek to get to the Mountainside fields.

We have come to count on seeing Andrew come to the game in his LA Dodgers uniform and we have endlessly chided Rich Varakian for catching and not catching foul balls. We’ve gotten used to seeing Brett and Joe peering out over the outfield fence in order to get the best angle and footage.

We’ve come to recognize the umps and their calls and have determined that some don’t like Westfield; some can’t see first base correctly and some need to borrow our video replays. We determined we had alot of “useless” advice for our boys but screamed it anyway, things like: Catch the ball; Hit the Ball; Throw the Ball over the Plate and our favorite: RUN. However, we have yet to tire of the word “Spartan.”

We’ve analyzed our coaches enough to know that Coach Anderson provides a celebratory fist bump at first, while Coach Rinaldi provides a pat on the back, a reward for getting that far and a reminder that the job at hand is still in front of them. And if Coach Rinaldi calls out a player number in digits, like nine-nine instead of ninety-nine, then the situation is urgent.

We lived the heat, hated the heat, cursed the heat and worried about the heat. The heat became an extra player on the team this season, always there in the dugout, in the field, always demanding more Gatorade.

We bit our nails at an exhilarating Springfield game under the lights in Warren; and shook our heads at our near-miss in the States against Denville. We raised our voices at the comeback victory against Watchung Hills in South Plainfield, and we cheered loudly -- heck, we even did the wave - as we watched our boys’ heroics against the big bad boys of Branchburg under a scorching midday summer sun.

We’ve checked the calendar and with some shock and awe we’ve come to realize that July is drawing to a close, which means that the real summer actually starts: family vacations are realized; our day jobs get renewed attention; we dust the cobwebs out of our pots and pans. And for those of us who have spent the summer blogging, we know our time pretending to be hip because we blog draws to an end.

How does a blogger capture the summer of 2011, the fun, the thrills, the laughter, the camaraderie, the joy of baseball played by thirteen-year-olds who simply love to play ball? For the first time this season, the only time this season, I find myself at a loss for words.