Red’s Wrap One Year Anniversary Post

On Saturday, I took my granddaughter, Alita, to watch her dad and grandfather play baseball for the Red Dots, a team in the old Un-American League started at Kern Park by a bunch of Riverwest lefties in the 70’s.  It’s kind of a weird thing that Nelson (26) and his Dad (61) play on the same team – if they aren’t getting along too well, people don’t even realize they’re related.

Anyway, I decided to take Alita because I wanted her to see her dad do something besides drive around in his white truck, go to work, come home and play video games.  I wanted her to know that he was a pretty good athlete,  a switch hitter and a really good fielder.  I wanted her to be proud of him.  Basically, that was it.  Things haven’t been going so well for him and I guess I wanted her to be proud of him.

Besides that, I knew I wanted to write this post – about Nelson and his dad playing on the same team and Alita watching.  So I went, prepared to snap some pictures and start crafting my little post.  So cute.

But it wasn’t.  Because the one thing I had forgotten about Nelson and his sport life is that he is really intense.  He is so intense that he shows up early and plays for teams who are short players before playing for the team he’s actually on.  So intense that he will slide into home without a shirt on and have the skid marks on his side to show for it.  After getting a home run or two earlier in the day, he’d been terrible at bat and made a couple of painful fielding errors.

So by the time that little Alita and I showed up for fanfest, her dad was in that crummy, dark, defeated funk – the same one that has MLB players throwing their bats and tearing off their gloves.

So what we did was…..we watched from afar.

Really afar.  We sat up on the hill under a big tree so her dad and grandpa were about the size of Lego people.  And we watched when Grandpa got a hit and when Dad caught a ball but the rest of the time, we looked at feathers and played tag.

At the end of the game, I watched a man from the opposing team come up to Nelson and put his arm around him.  Even from afar, I knew he was telling him to ease up, not to be so intense.  Like no one had ever told him before.  Good luck with that, I thought.  Then his dad walked over, gave him a business card for a guy who does job counseling.  He wasn’t worried about Nelson’s intensity and had no sympathy for his bad baseball day. He had already moved on.  Now it was about the girl on the hill.