What's the Score?

Recently I was sitting at a youth baseball game (imagine that), this time for my youngest boy. I began to think about all the crazy, bizarre terminology that everyone gets caught up in while attending these club games.  I decided to just sit through the last couple innings completely silent, and just take it all in. Just listen. And it really is true.  Baseball parents are nuts. And honestly, it’s not just the parents who are nuts, yelling or speaking in tongues that a normal, non-sport or non-baseball person would not understand…it was everyone. Everyone in attendance. Teammates talking to other teammates, coaches talking to players, coaches talking to umps, umps talking to players and coaches, parents shouting to players.

So, what about the rest of the world?  Sometimes I forget there’s a world beyond baseball, and baseball families and kids and coaches and teams and players and umps and 5-6 game weekends and traveling, and hotels and dirt-filled cars and rain delays and missing baseball socks and dirty uniforms and water jugs and a garage full of equipment.  But there definitely is.  There are the football families, the soccer moms, volleyball teams, basketball teams, gymnastics groups, cross country families, swimming organizations, and so on and so on.

  Then there are the non-sport families, who’s kids have excelled in music, and drama and art.  Then there is hunting, fishing, archery, spelling bees, computers, chess teams, debate teams and so forth.

We all have our own little villages of craziness, our die-hard commitment to our kids, and our endless support of that one “thing” they have chosen to excel in.  And within that little village is a unique language families become accustomed to, filled with phrases and terms that only they understand.  All I know is, this has become my norm.  This language of baseball. And the more I am around it and hear it, the more I start to say it too.

So, my “norm,” (the language that I have grown to not even think twice about), I decided to think twice about.  I got out a pad of paper and a pen and just started writing down everything that was being said during those last two innings. Every play, things shouted in between each batter, each out, each pitch, I just listened.  In the last 20 minutes of the game, I had jotted down 35 little phrases that had been said. By someone around me. Either on or off the field. Of the 35 phrases, I’d say I knew 33 for sure, and maybe needed a little clarity on 2 of them.  Which seems about accurate. I have sat through hundreds of youth baseball games over the last decade. I mean, I even wrote a book about it all, for God’s sake.  But in true, typical “Mary” form, there were a few that I did not know.

Let me enlighten you with my list of 35 phrases. How many do you recognize? There is no quiz at the end. Let’s just see what you know about how I spend my time….

1. BACK!
2. Drive it somewhere
3. Eat it! Eat it! Eat it!
4. Step off
5. Trade places with him
6. Fill it up
7. Hey, protect, you got 2 on ya
8. You gotta wear that
9. Bring ‘em in
10. That’s been the spot all day long
11. Open, Open
12. Good eye
13. Get a Secondary
14. Hey that’s not you
15. In two!
16. Turn Two
17. Ball in! Comin Down!
18. Hold ‘em right here
19. Throw it around
20. Two out rally
21. Any base
22. Stay on the ball
23. Make an adjustment
24. Roll it up
25. Hey, know who’s got the bag
26. Get a better lead
27. He’s Going!
28. Through the base
29. Stay hot
30. Now you’ve seen it
31. Run it out
32. Way to stay alive
33. Live there
34. Ball-Ball-Ball-Ball-pitcher
35. One more, boys

How did you do? Did you get them all?  If you didn’t, don’t feel bad.  It’s taken me years to know what it all means, and I still end up having to ask someone at almost every game, “Wait, what just happened? What did that mean again?” 

Remember that scene from “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off” when Principal Ed Rooney, is in the pizza place looking for Ferris, and while he is drying his face off with napkins, he notices the Cubs game is on the TV. And he has no clue what’s happening with this game, he’s just a total moron when it comes to sports…

He asks the server, what’s the score? And when the answer is “nothin to nothin,”

Rooney then asks, “Who’s winning?”

“Um, the Bears.”

Ed Rooney’s moronic clueless mind about what is happening is exactly how I feel when I try to watch football. Any and all professional football games. I just don’t have a clue. I mean, this is what all of America is watching every Sunday.  And Monday. And Thursday. I married someone who could be a sports analyst for the NFL, he knows so much about the game and teams and players. Me? Not so much. I’ve tried. I’ve tried to sit through a game. I know the terms touchdown and interception. And that’s about it.  Something just doesn’t click for me when it comes to the sport.

So don’t feel bad if that baseball list above makes no sense. We can’t all know everything. I tell people at the games all the time, don’t ever ask me the score, just when I think I know it, I’m wrong. No one is perfect. We all have a little Ed Rooney in us.