As a dad, it’s been a treat and a delight to watch my son develop and grow his love for baseball over the past eleven years. He has loved that game more than I loved anything as a kid.

I’m not sure where it came from, really, because sports has never been my thing. At all.  And when I do pay attention to anything in the sporting world, it’s usually college football.  But no matter.  I’ve been more than happy to nurture and encourage his love for baseball.  In fact it’s been a lot of fun.

Tanner has never been happy simply playing ball.  Just showing up at little league games wasn’t enough to quench his thirst, and he became the ubiquitous instigator of neighborhood games.  He would work the telephone or scour the neighborhood to round up all the usual suspects, corralling them into our front yard where they would play until it became too dark to see the ball anymore.  Even as late in the year as November, Saturday afternoons would find a group of boys bundled up in winter coats and hats, playing their hearts out as if that very game was the Little League World Series. And in the dead of winter they would pile into our basement to play the same game, but on the Wii.  On those sad days when nobody else was available to play, he would stand in our front yard for hours, just swinging his bat, alone.

I had a personal rule which up to now I’ve never shared with Tanner.  Whenever he asked me to play catch, the answer was always “Yes”.  It didn’t matter how busy I was or what I was doing.  Sometimes when he knew I was working he’d come to me with ball and glove in hand, and with the most humble sense of hope and gentleness, he’d say, “Dad, I know you’re busy and if you can’t it’s okay, but do you think you’d have time to play catch sometime soon?” At that moment, absolutely nothing else in the world mattered and the answer was always the same.

I will never forget the conversation when we broke the news to the kids that we were definitely moving to the Caribbean island of St. Martin.  Up to that point we had discussed it as a possibility, but it had always been a “maybe”.  Leading up to Cari’s acceptance to AUC, Tanner had only expressed one concern or question about life in St. Martin.

“Do they have baseball?”

I had spent time on Google trying to answer that question for him, and I’d found some sketchy but conclusive evidence that there was indeed little league baseball on the island of St. Martin.  But from the few glimpses I had seen, I knew something else too: I knew this was not going to be the same kind of baseball to which he was accustomed.  I knew there would be no clean-cropped fields of green grass, no minivan moms cheering them from the sidelines, no teenyboppers selling popcorn and cold drinks for a dollar.  I knew that baseball in St. Martin was going to be sandlot baseball, but to a whole different kind of extreme.  I knew it would test and stretch his love of this game.  And I knew I was interested to see how he would respond.

So as we sat in the living room in our home in Small Town, Heartland, America and told our kids we were leaving the country for 20 months to live on an island in the Caribbean, Tanner looked at his dad and with a hint of panic behind his eyes said, “Are you SURE they have baseball?”

“I’m sure.” I answered.  “I even found the little league stadium on Google Earth.”

“You’re absolutely positive?” he asked.

“Tanner.  I would not lie to you.  I am absolutely positive.”

I watched the panic wash away and and relief take its place.  He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and said, “Ok, then I guess it’s okay if we move there.  We can go.”

 

 

 

 

 

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Caribbean Baseball:

On the same trip into Philipsburg when I was trying to get our Internet working (and ended up lying about where we lived to get it), I happened to take a wrong turn and ended up driving right past the little league stadium.  We’d been on the island for less than two weeks and Tanner had asked about playing baseball no less than one hundred times.  Thrilled with this serendipitous discovery, I pulled into the back lot and asked the first person I saw, an islander, about when and how to enroll my son in little league baseball.

“You talk to that white guy over there.  He tell you.”

“That white guy” ended up being Tom, a bearded, happy American who I liked right away and who informed me that they play baseball here year round, and that the season would start in April.  “We practice every day but Sunday.  Weekdays three to five and Saturdays ten to noon.  It’s $20.00 per year and all he needs to do is fill out an application and bring a copy of his passport or any other official ID so we know his age.”

I should stop for a moment and describe this stadium.  By all American standards, the place is an absolute dump.  Even when it had been initially built,  the construction had been to typical Caribbean style standards and since then not much effort had been put into maintenance.  I’m aware that by saying this I’m revealing my prejudice and condensing American sense of superiority.  I ask your forgiveness, but I also suspect you might understand.  On one hand I knew these local kids were dang lucky to have this place and that someone had moved heaven and earth to raise the money to build it.  On the other hand, I also knew that the very sight of it would be demoralizing to Tanner.

In hindsight, maybe I should have prepped him with what to expect.  Maybe had I been upfront and honest about what he was going to experience his reaction would have been different.  Instead, I came home and told him with all the enthusiasm I could muster that I’d found the stadium, met his coach, and had the information we needed to get him playing.

He glowed.  For the next few days before I took him for the first time, he was downright giddy with anticipation.  On the day I took him for the first time, he was dressed to play hours before it was time to go, and he counted down the minutes until we were on the road.

As we drove into the stadium lot and he began to look around, he said nothing, but I know him well enough that I think I could gauge his thoughts.  He wasn’t going to let initial impressions get him down, and he got out of the car with a firm step and with confidence in his walk.  But I could also feel his underlying sense of nervousness.  I introduced him to Coach Tom, who genuinely welcomed him and told him they were glad to have him.

Tom is an excellent coach.  It became quickly obvious that he is firm and doesn’t put up with nonsense, but also that there is a mutual respect between him and the boys. More than any of his coaches had back in St. Cloud, Tom was taking the time to give them all little pointers, one on one.  If Tanner sticks this out, I thought, his baseball skills will improve remarkably while he’s here.

And of course I also watched Tanner.  I could tell that he was not in his element and wasn’t particularly enjoying himself. He was going though all the right motions, but he wasn’t interacting with any of the other boys, nor they with him. After practice he was acting a bit mopey, and he said that he really hadn’t enjoy it all that much.

“I think it will get better as you keep going” I said.

“Yeah” he shrugged.  “I hope so.”

Over the next few weeks we took him out there at least twice a week, and every time we took him, his enthusiasm to go back the next time dropped a few notches.  So far he hadn’t asked to stop going, but I could sense that this request might be on the horizon.

I asked him on the way home one time why he wasn’t enjoying it.

“Mostly because all the kids are jerks.”

“All of them?”

“Well maybe not all of them, but most of them.”

“Most of them?”

“A lot of ’em, yeah.”

I asked him what they did that made them jerks, and as he tried his best to answer, it became clear to me that, for the most part, what he was experiencing was a culture gap.  These boys don’t behave the same way that 10, 11 and 12 year old boys back home behave, and through his young American eyes, their behavior was rude. They would argue over batting order, they would shove each other, including Tanner, out of line.  They would cat-call to each other using words he wasn’t accustomed to hearing at American little league.

And there was also a language barrier.  Sure, they speak English, but it’s a whole different kind of English.  Often times the assistant coach would ask Tanner to do something, and neither Tanner nor I had any idea what he had just said, which made them both frustrated.

Finally, after five weeks of going to baseball at least twice a week, Tanner finally said it.

“I don’t think I want to go to baseball any more.”

To be honest I was surprised it took him that long.  He hadn’t been enjoying it all along.  But I also wasn’t ready to let him throw in the towel either.  I knew it was hard for him right now, but I also had the benefit of adult perspective and I knew that if he would tough this out that it could turn into an incredible multicultural experience that he would treasure forever, not to mention how he could seriously improve his baseball skills.  I also knew that if he quit the day would come that he would regret his decision.

I gave him the same pep talk that I’d given Andi about sailing, encouraged him to stick with it just a little bit longer, and asked him to give it an honest try before quitting. He wasn’t happy about it, be he agreed to stick it out a little longer.

I felt confident that if he hung with this long enough to begin to feel at home that he would eventually figure out how to click and mesh with these boys, and that when that happened, his love of baseball combined with the thrill of new friends from a different culture could be the magical stuff of dreams and movies.  And I knew that the skill of learning to get along with people different than you would pay huge dividends for the rest of his life. But I also knew that at the age of eleven, all this was nearly impossible to understand.  And I also wanted to be sure that I wasn’t imposing my dreams on him.

To Tanner’s credit, he stuck it out another four practices.  Each time he came away downhearted and glum.  I think the clincher for me was when some of the boys filled his water bottle with sand while he was out in the field.  He came into the dugout thirsty and looking forward to a drink, only to find his bottle full of mud.

All in all, I’m proud of the kid for sticking it out for as long as he did.  He gave it an honest try, and stuck with it long enough to know that it was truly something he didn’t want to pursue. So while we are here on the island, we’ve decided, he can try activities he can’t do back at home… Island, Caribbean type activities.

Baseball, after all, will still be there when we get back to America.