The Boys of Summer

By: George V. Howe

As most of you may know, baseball was a passion of mine for many years and growing up in Emerson, NJ, summertime meant one thing: baseball! I played a lot of baseball in a lot of towns and cities across the country as a youth, teenager and adult and I can say with certainty, Little League, and the moments spent with my friends on hot summer days were the best of times. I certainly don’t recall specifics about winning or losing, hitting home runs or striking out, but the memories of free popsicles at the Snack Shack, Dairy Queen stops after ballgames, pizza parties in the dugout and car rides with coaches and teammates remain vivid. Oh, to be a kid again.

I have a thousand of those memories that I can describe in a fair amount of detail, which is odd considering I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday. But there are a few that stand out: Coach Mulligan driving like “Batman” to the ballfield…yes, Batman was a big deal to a kid growing up in the 70’s. My father walking to the mound to remove me as a pitcher after hitting the first 5 batters I ever faced, and saying “congratulations, you’re now a catcher!” …I was 7. Going to Nola’s Pizzeria to eat calzones after a game…I would always get the meatball with extra sauce and cheese. Coach McCaffrey taking us all to Dairy Queen after we ran the tables in Majors Division and won the World Series…ok, I remembered one championship! Or my mother yelling from the stands, “think positive, George!”, after I was hit in the face with a line drive…she was into transcendental meditation at the time – maybe an article for another day!

Luckily, I have the privilege to relive it all again through coaching Nolan and his friends, all of whom remind me of the life-long experiences they are creating, which seldom have anything to do with the competition of it all. When I asked him recently how he thought the game went, Nolan said “pretty good, but we ran out of Snickers in the cooler.” An honest assessment through the eyes of a 12-year-old and a failure of coaching strategery if there ever was one.

These kids are a good little team of ballplayers, but they are complete goofballs and characters on and off the field, which makes it a joy to coach them. A few weekends ago, we took the team to a baseball tournament in Waterville, Maine. We housed all the kids and families at a small lakeside inn that provided all the boating, fishing, swimming and s’mores a kid could handle. Thankfully, save for a few random hotel guests, the Pembroke 11’s were the only ones there, thus running amok and playing Ghosts in the Graveyard well past curfew.

The bonus, of course, was the opportunity to play on “Little Fenway”, a 66% scale replica of Fenway Park, complete with turf field and all of the nuances of the old ballpark. I can guarantee they didn’t know the score of the game, or what their record was for the tournament, but took a thousand pictures in front of the Little Green Monster and ran around the bases after the game until the superintendent told them they were shutting the lights off.

Hopefully these kids will remember those moments and cherish them…I sure did.