Summer Camp Baseball

First off I do not have fond memories of summer camp. My parents sent me to three different summer camps over five years and I'm very happy that I never have to go there ever again. (Unless there's reincarnation.)

Next up I am no good at all at sports, except for volley ball at which I excel, but this is about baseball, not volley ball. I am a klutz with a hockey stick and since I've been off the ice for decades I probably can't skate any more. I was not good at it when I was a kid. I cannot catch a spherical ball. I'm not bad with a football but I do not have the stamina, or the willingness to have bones broken, required for that sport. As far as hitting a ball with a bat goes forget it. I can't do that either.

I was at summer camp. This was my third year of being at summer camp and my first at this particular one. Let me give it a fictional name for you: Camp Moosewappi. If you find 'Mooswappi' on Google I will be somewhat surprised but not floored. I just made that up as I wrote it.

There we are day one or day two at Camp Moosewappi and out camp councilor, let's call him Bob, gets all enthusiastic about us playing baseball. When I say us, I mean the group of kids that were put together to be led by this councilor. There must have been a camping type name for it but I have mercifully forgotten what it was. For lack of a better term for it I'll call it a cabin. You OK, with that? You better be.

I went first with my baseball flaws and deficits. Turns out I had been put in with a cabin full of baseball losers. I was not the only one who had extreme difficulty with the skills required by that particular sport. One by one, each of the guys in my cabin admitted their lack of interest in baseball due to their incompetence with that sport.

At the end of this defeatist outpouring Bob looked thoroughly dejected and defeated. I mean his shoulders were hunched over. He gazed down at the floor. He emitted a series of deep sighs.

Nevertheless, baseball was on the agenda. There was a camp tournament among the cabins. Time had been scheduled for it. Like it or not we could not opt out of playing baseball. We had sympathy for Bob. He had obviously been good at sports and perhaps had even experienced winning from time to time.

Bob took us out to one of the baseball diamonds and began by assessing our skills, or rather, I should say, our lack of skills. We played what I think is called round robin baseball. People take positions on the playing field while someone goes to bat and when they strike out or are tagged out they go on the playing field while everyone moves to the next position.

Doing that, everyone gets to do everything. They get to bat, catch, pitch, field, be at a base, and so on. We did that for a while and I could see Bob's exasperation at how really bad we were. Like I said, baseball was on the agenda, and he was getting paid to be the councilor so he did what he could.

Having assessed our lack of skills he then set into assigning us positions on the team. Where in the typical assignment of positions a coach looks for the most skilled player for any given place on the team. In Bob's case he had to look for the people who was the least unskilled.

I should interject here. You are probably comparing us to 'The Bad News Bears' or something like that. Look. The players on 'The Bad News Bears' actually wanted to play baseball. I mean, they had skills.

The thing Bob and the rest of us did was acknowledge and accept ourselves for the way we were with all our flaws and shortcomings. Once Bob had assigned places on the team we started to practice. We learned to take into account the difficulties of the other players on the team and work around them. For example, my teammates knew that if they did anything other than a very soft lob of the ball to me there was no way in the world I would ever catch it.

We spent that first day working all that out and practicing. The next day we had our first game playing against the guys from one of the other cabins. I really can't remember how the game played out. As I remember it the other team showed up all cocky and confident, while we showed up all fearful and defeatist.

What none of us knew going into that game was that Bob had made us into a team. Individually we sucked. Together, allowing for each of our flaws and weaknesses and playing up what little strengths we each had we managed somehow to defeat the other team.

Everyone in the camp seemed to be surprised with this unexpected anomaly, none more than us. We could not believe it. Bob was over the moon. Having won a game we became a little less defeatist. We practiced some more when we had free time, which was scheduled daily. We each became somewhat more competent but nothing approaching any kind of superstar competence.

Bob did his job. He reordered out batting lineup. He rearranged our defensive positions and he made us practice the skills we were weak with, which was pretty much all of them.

As this story gets longer I'm about to bring it to a close. I think I've made my point, anyway. Over the two weeks of that camping session our cabin won the baseball championship, defeating all the other much more skilled and competent players in the camp.

Somewhere, if it still exists, there is a carved and painted wooden Indian chief supported by a pyramid of half inch thick wooden disks, one for each camp year. On one of those disks the names of the guys in my cabin have been engraved with a wood burning tool for having won the baseball championship that summer so long ago.