...Sons

The other side of the relationship.

In my last piece, I explored the theme of fathers and sons in baseball, and I wasn’t always complimentary to the most famous dads in baseball history, or at times, even to my own father. Let me be clear, I don’t think I was particularly unfair, but as we shift gears to the other side of that relationship, a few things need to be addressed.

First off, being a dad is hard. I have three kids of my own, ranging from ages seventeen to seven, and it’s given me a whole new appreciation for my dad and all the headaches I’ve caused him in my life. The basic job of a father is to provide for his kids and prepare them to be successful in their own lives. Sounds easy enough, but the devil is in the details. It’s difficult to know when to offer a hug and when to play the heavy and all the stuff that falls in between, and kids don’t always make it easy on you.

Like I said, I have three sons (just like the old TV show), and they all have distinct personalities. The oldest is quiet and reserved, which I’d say is my default demeanor. The middle one is the cool kid, adventurous to the point of recklessness sometimes, and he’s got a smart mouth that often gets him in trouble. He gets that from both his mom and me, only he doesn’t possess the same kind of filter we do. And my youngest is a joyful and outgoing kid who sings and dances and can make a friend out of anyone. Hopefully, that doesn’t fade too much as he nears his teenage years.

The older two kids are from my first marriage, which fell apart around the time they were six and four. I remarried a few years later (as did their mom), and along came their little brother. The whole multiple home and family things adds another wrinkle to raising children, but their mom and I get along well enough and I think we manage without too many hiccups.

Surprisingly, baseball helps. I say surprisingly because all three of my sons have very different attitudes toward baseball and sports in general. My oldest couldn’t care less about sports. We took him to a KU basketball game at Allen Fieldhouse once and he was unmoved, which was mind-boggling to me. Baseball, however, is the lone exception. He doesn’t follow the sport closely, but he’s always up for going to the ballpark. The food may have something to do with this, I’ll admit, but he does seem to genuinely enjoy watching a live ballgame.

My middle child was a sports fanatic like me in his pre-teen years. He followed all the major sports, collected cards, and he played little league baseball. He was actually pretty good too, despite inheriting the athleticism of me and his mom. This is why I will never be one of those crazy sports dads pushing my kids to excel where I failed so I can live vicariously through them. I know what genes they’re working with. But despite his skinny frame, my son was a damn good catcher.

For better or worse, he’s reached the age where baseball is taking a backseat. He’s more interested in hanging out with friends and girls and all sorts of other things that can get him into trouble. Yes, parenting was a lot easier when all he cared about was sports, but I can’t fault him too much for it. I went through the same thing, and like me, I’m hoping he’ll come back around to baseball down the road. He still follows the game, especially the Royals and Phillies, his adopted second team, just not as closely as he once did.

That leaves my youngest, who is just now discovering the sport. He played coach-pitch little league last year. If you’ve never watched first graders play baseball, it’s a little like herding cats, but he definitely improved throughout the summer and it’s fun to watch his understanding of the game develop. The kid’s extracurricular calendar is more stacked than my work schedule, but he regularly tells me baseball is his favorite sport. Maybe he’s telling me what he knows I want to hear, but it warms my heart every time he says it.

I took the older two boys to their first game in 2015. It was an early season matchup between Kansas City and Cincinnati with Yordano Ventura on the mound against Johnny Cueto. The coolest part about that game is Ventura outdueled Cueto, who became his teammate before the season was over, when the Royals made a deal with the Reds to strengthen their pitching staff for the postseason. It worked, and the Royals won the World Series. You can read more about that specific game here, but I’m just glad they got to see greatness in action. Sure, they don’t remember it all that well, but at least they have the ticket stub.

Like me, my older sons’ first game was during a championship season for the Royals. Their little brother wasn’t so lucky. He wasn’t even born yet in 2015, and he was still too young to attend when we saw the Royals play the Astros in 2017, which was the best game I’ve ever seen live. His first game wasn’t until 2019, an extraordinarily dull loss to the White Sox in sweltering heat.

Fortunately, he doesn’t even remember it, although it wasn’t all bad. His older brother (my middle son) made it onto the CrownVision that day. In over thirty years of going to baseball games, I’d never been on the jumbotron before, and he did it before he turned eleven. What can I say, the kid has a magnetic personality when he turns it on. He also talked a Cleveland bullpen catcher out of a ball in his second ever game. To this day, I’ve never gone home with a game ball.

The first game my youngest son actually remembers came two years later against the Reds. By then, the Royals were fully in the tank. This was no World Series team, and they lost 4-0. It wasn’t the infamous Thom Brenneman game, but Nick Castellanos did hit a home run, so we’ll always have that memory. The most important thing was he had a good time, and why shouldn’t he? Baseball has been a constant thread in his life.

On the day he was born, while his mom recovered from her C-section, I held him for the first time and we watched a Cubs-Giants playoff game on TV. He had a lot of health problems for the first few years of his life (thankfully, he seems to have outgrown them), which meant a lot of overnight stays in the hospital. I remember sitting with him during one such stay, watching the Royals while he received a breathing treatment. Adalberto Mondesi made a spectacular catch, but ended up seriously injuring his shoulder in the process, which pretty much sums up Mondesi’s career in a single play.

Now he’s the most vocal kid at the ballpark. So much so that he regularly annoys his older brother. We didn’t make it to Opening Day last year, but we did get out to the K for the opening series. The Royals lost to the Twins, but the most entertaining part of the game for me and my wife was listening to my youngest son yell, “LET’S GO ROYALS!” over and over at the top of his lungs as my middle son grew more and more frustrated with him. I felt bad for the people in front of us, whose ears were the real victims, but it was quite the performance.

I can’t wait to see it again this year and for many years to come.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. If you’re a parent, I’d love to hear your best baseball parent stories in the comments!