Father & son umpire team, Rick and Rick Velez Jr.

Not surprisingly, yesterday Bob and I spent yet another Father’s Day at the ball field – specifically at the Manheim (PA) 12U annual Father’s Day Tournament. The Indians have played in this tournament for more years than I can count. So many memories surround this beloved event – some fond, some – well, shall we say, legendary. All permanently engraved on my heart and forever etched in my mind.

Fourteen years ago, one of our grandson’s was born during a Manheim Father’s Day Tournament game. Another year, Bob had to have his wedding band cut off his finger between games because he stuck his hand out to catch a foul ball. Many years, our kids and grandkids who were able to have dropped by to celebrate their dad and “pap” doing what he loves. We were even introduced to a precious new “grand puppy” at one year’s game. And when I close my eyes, I can still see Bob’s elderly parents sitting in their rickety aluminum folding chairs on the sidelines, cheering for him and the team, even though his mom wasn’t a baseball fan and understood little about the game.

Then there were the times when: for reasons still unknown, one of our coaches rolled a ball onto the field during play (um, embarrassing); our fans got uncharacteristically reprimanded by an umpire for questioning calls; an umpire threatened to “toss” Bob if our fans didn’t settle down; and one year, some of our fans stoically remained huddled on the bleachers under huge umbrellas waiting out a deluge-induced rain delay.

Once again this year, as in many years past, a number of former Indian players and their parents came out to watch some of the Father’s Day tournament games. We chit-chat -  “Remember the time that … , I’ll never forget when…” I cherish these brief but special moments of reconnection with people with whom our paths now seldom cross but with whom Bob and I have shared many good times and sweet memories.

This year, the Indians had the privilege of having a Father’s Day game fittingly officiated by a father / son umpire team. Over the years, these guys also have done some of our league games, so Bob knows them both pretty well. They are nice guys, pretty good umpires (as umpires go) and above all, dedicated to youth sports.

At one point during the game, this umpire duo stood side-by-side chatting on the first baseline while the Indians and their opponent prepared for the bottom of an inning. Camera in hand, I called out their names and snapped their picture as they turned toward me. I love this picture for so many reasons, but mostly because it underscores all that is good about a day set aside to honor and spend time with our dads. Like umpires, few dads get it right every time, but the good ones, the ones who really care, show up every game day, stand by those they love through good times and bad times, and make the best calls they can each time.

What once was a study nook in a teenager’s bedroom eventually became an office’s trophy nook where some of the 133 trophies displayed throughout the room have found a home.

We just finished painting Bob’s home office – AKA the “trophy room” (A place for everything – and every well-dusted thing in its place). The room hadn’t been repainted since our youngest child claimed the space as her teenage bedroom. She’s 38. Repainting was just a tad bit overdue.

It was an exhausting labor of love. Baseball trophies — well over a hundred of them — taken down off shelves one-by-one. Plaques, ribbons, hats, bats all came down too, exposing great expanses of yellowish paint still in such surprisingly good condition that, for a second or two, we actually considered saving ourselves a ton of work by scrapping the whole painting project. But we quickly agreed the yellow paint that once nicely complemented a teenager’s paisley bedspread really didn’t work as a backdrop for shiny gold trophies, so we pressed on.

We took pictures of how everything had been arranged prior to painting, hoping to save time putting the trophies back in place once the job was done. Bob tried (but failed) to pare down the number of trophies to redisplay. Everything had a story to tell or a memory attached, each too good to simply pack away. So after the more subtle, office-suitable beige paint dried, back it all went — all one-hundred plus trophies back to their prepainting positions.

This room redo was a long time coming, and we like the transformation. To the untrained eye, it probably looks almost the same as before, but to us it seems more calm and relaxing, despite the sunlight that still bounces off the trophies in all directions.

We invited our daughter, the room’s previous occupant, to take a look so she could see how different the space was with its more sophisticated paint color. She hardly noticed any change, other than the two pieces of furniture that had switched places. We were more than a little disappointed. Was all that work even worth the effort?

Absolutely! Not only do Bob and I think the more neutral wall color looks much better, but taking down and putting back those 133 trophies (yes, I counted them on their way back to the shelves) gave us an opportunity to relive many special memories and recall the players and families we came to know through baseball. And we would do it all over again. ALL of it – the painting AND the 33 years of baseball.

I’ve heard that children become more resilient when they work through disappointments. If that’s the case (which I believe it is), the boys on this year’s Mountville Indians team, along with countless other kids, are destined to become part of a generation of exceptionally resilient individuals.

Over the years, Bob and I have been surprised to hear time and time again that landing a spot on the Indians team is something many of our community’s young ball players dream of from an early age. And we’re told they don’t just dream about it. For years, many work on improving their baseball mechanics to better their chances of making the team when the time comes. Many forego other opportunities hoping to make their dream become reality.

And then, BOOM! – just like that, a pandemic strikes, blowing up their dream. Baseball postponed. Cooperstown cancelled. Kids disappointed, devastated. Dreams crushed.

Now, after more than three months of impatiently waiting, a baseball season once thought improbable is about to begin! To be sure, it will be a baseball season like none other. There will be new rules, heighten concerns, and plenty of rust under the players’ hoods. But just beneath that patina I suspect will be retooled dreams that eventually will shine through, rubbed sparkling bright by three months of pent up energy and the excitement of finally being able to play the game they love.

This season won’t be the season the players had dreamed of, but it likely will be a season when they grow strong and wise beyond their 11 or 12 years. It will be a season where they learn, as players have always been encouraged to do at the Dreams Park in Cooperstown, to dream new dreams.

I love stories – reading them, writing them, telling them. For me, there’s something very satisfying about wrapping words around ideas, but there’s something almost MAGICAL about telling the wordless story through photos. These are the things that inspire me to shoot game photos and write this blog for the Indians.

I’m especially captivated by candid, in-the-moment photos (like these). There’s an extraordinary authenticity, depth and imperfectness in these images whose stories could never be adequately expressed with even more than a thousand words.

Having a good camera, the right lighting, the perfect angle are all important to storytelling done through the camera lens, but far less so than anticipating and spontaneously recording the moments of reflection, celebration, even sadness and frustration from which a wordless narrative springs.

Focus is important too, but given the choice, I’d rather perfectly focus the lens of the story than that of the camera. That’s why I almost always crop my photos (sometimes very tightly) and sometimes convert them to black and white – pruning away everything that distracts from the purity of the story I want to tell. As one of the best articles I’ve read recently about photography says, “Pick a tree in the forest, and tell the story of the forest from that tree. A (good) photo requires deliberate subtraction. Photos aren’t supposed to be the perfect depiction of anything. They exist for our delight.” (Stop Taking Pictures. Start Taking Photos)

It’s gratifying to hear that the photos I take of the Indians give delight to others. I consider it a privilege to tell the stories of these special moments through the lens of my camera.

Let me first apologize for such an uncharacteristically lengthy post. My initial intent was simply to write a little something about the importance of team uniforms. But I discovered some interesting and perhaps little known facts about the history of MLB uniforms, so I’ve included them here for your enjoyment.

The Indians have two jerseys – gold and black – and wear their pants both long and short, but all players wear the same “uniform” (style and color) in the same game.

The first official baseball game was played in 1846, but no team wore a team uniform until three years later. The first baseball uniforms were made of uncomfortably heavy fabrics such as wool and flannel, which may help explain why full length pants quickly gave way to baggy knicker-style pants. (Some say it was to reveal more “leg” so that women would be more enticed to come to games!)

Around 1900 all MLB teams were wearing team uniforms following a failed experiment where each player wore a different colored outfit based on his position, this in an attempt to help scorekeepers attribute errors to the correct players. Can you imagine how confusing that must have been?

Colored socks were part of the uniforms in the early days of baseball. Stirrups, which began to decline in 1990s when a few key players started wearing their pants down to their shoes, came into existence in the early 1900s after a player got blood poisoning from being cleated through his dyed sock. Dyes back then were not colorfast and it was believed that the dye seeped into the wound causing infection. So a white “sanitary” sock worn with a stirrup – a separate colored covering that had a cut out around the ankle (so that players could still fit into their cleats), was introduced. The opening of the cut out was intentionally small so that the sock still appeared to sport the team’s colors, stripes or logo.

In the 1920s, numbers were placed on the backs of jerseys. And as more games were televised, players’ names also appeared on jerseys, and home and away uniforms were issued.

So there you have it – a snapshot look at the evolution of baseball team uniforms! Although many things changed over the years, someone figured out early in the game’s history the value of team uniforms:

• They help visually distinguish competing teams and identify players.
• They foster team spirit, pride and unity.
• They create a sense of player equality.

And until the 1990s, players seemed to appreciate these values as evidenced by their universal compliance with the dictionary definition of the word “uniform”: “having always the same form, manner, or degree : not varying or variable.”

Sadly, today it’s become common to see “variation” in team uniforms (I think we call that an oxymoron) – particularly both long pants vs. knicker style pants being worn during the same game by players on the same team. This is allowed to happen despite the fact that the Official Baseball Rules state that:

• “All players on a team shall wear uniforms identical in color, trim and style.”
• and that “No player whose uniform does not conform to that of his teammates shall be permitted to participate in a game.”

Last time I checked, pants were part of the uniform, and “style” meant a manner of doing something, a distinctive appearance. So to me, wearing pants in a different manner violates both the letter of the law and the spirit of it.

Rules aside, many fans say that they don’t like the long pants – it looks sloppy. Others argue that pants worn at the knees help umpires see the strike zone more consistently, but there’s no hard evidence to support that. Interestingly though, umpires once fought against the long pants because THEY felt it made it harder to see the strike zone (which ends at the knees). And it’s also said that Leo Durocher told Willie Mays during a hitting slump to pull his pants up to his knees because he thought it was costing him strikes. Mays got two hits the day after he did as his manager asked  - so you be the judge.

I personally don’t have a strong opinion about long pants vs. short pants. I do have one about the uniformness of uniforms. Our coaches must too. They apparently appreciate the value of a team “uniform” and adhere to the dictionary meaning of the word as well as the official rules of the game. But they also appreciate that players may have varying preferences about how they like to wear their pants. To accommodate this “variable,” for some games our players collectively decide to wear long pants; for some games they decide to wear short pants – but they ALWAYS ALL wear their pants the same way in the same game. This does not vary. They look like a team. They play like a team. Maybe we’re on to something!

On April 6, Bob and I celebrated 44 years of marriage. We were just kids -19 and 20 years old; two high school sweethearts who met at a burger joint where we both worked. There was a snow squall the morning of our wedding day. Huge snowflakes that seemed to be the size of baseballs fell from the sky then quickly disappeared as they hit the ground. Some say that snow on a wedding day is considered good luck. Maybe. In retrospect, those baseball-sized snowflakes were probably more of a foreshadowing of what our life together would become. I should have known.

Before we got married, I knew Bob enjoyed baseball. He played in high school and on the Legion team. We talked about baseball sometimes – how as a little boy he wore clunky corrective shoes instead of sneakers to play ball because he had been born with a club foot; how he played 12U ball as a 7-year old; how he played ball every day, all summer long as a kid, stopping only for lunch and dinner. I should have known how deeply the baseball waters flowed within him.

On April 8, two days after we were married, we drove to Williamsburg VA to spend a few days. Our honeymoon was modest – even by 1974 standards. We checked into a nice but unpretentious motel with a lake view. We toured the Colonial city. We ate fast food. Whatever the day lacked in frills was more than made up for in the fun we were having simply spending our very first vacation day as a married couple.

If I had missed the telltale signs beforehand of the life I was destined to live as Bob’s wife, the first evening of our honeymoon should have been my wakeup call. Back in our motel room, in the romantic, blue glow of a TV screen, we watched Hank Aaron hit his 715th career home run, shattering Babe Ruth’s longstanding record. It was a memorable night!

Looking back, I can now see how much baseball has always been a big part of Bob’s life. I can’t say that I ever cared much about baseball all those years ago. But slowly and without notice it seeped into the available spaces of our life together until it became what it is today  - a part of “us.” Two had become one. I should have known.

photo courtesy of Chris Ahern

Team uniforms were distributed to the new crop of Indian players this week – another step in the natural progression from January’s player evaluations to April’s first game of the season. I’ve recently learned though that this is not necessarily an insignificant part of an ordinary process.

Arriving home with his black and gold Indians jersey in-hand, one newly minted player proclaimed, “Dad, I’m now officially a Mountville Indian. I can’t even describe how much this means to me.” Wow! More than “making the team,” the seemingly simple act of bestowing a team jersey to him was validation that his dream actually had now, finally, become a reality – a larger-than-life reality of which he was in total awe.

The weightiness of an Indians jersey placed in the eager hands of a wide-eyed, first time Indian player can belie the shirt’s physical size. Woven into the fabric, sewn into the seams can be the heft of some pretty big dreams of a kid who has always imagined what it would be like to wear an Indians uniform. That makes it a pretty big deal.

But where the dream ends, the hard work begins – the work of translating the dream into the experience. In baseball as in all of life, to preserve a dream’s worth, we need to give our very best in living it out, not just now-and-then, but every day – at every game, practice, at-bat, and during every play and inning in the field. We must be willing to “give the shirt off our back” – do whatever is asked, no matter the sacrifice; only then will we be able to look back on a dream and see that it actually became all we imagined it could be – and possibly more.

Hard to believe it’s been almost two years since I last wrote a blog post. No excuses – other than I felt I had run out of things to say. And before I knew it, days had turned into months and months into years.

There’s one thing that has been on my mind lately though. As I meet the parents of new Indians players each year, it seems that they keep getting younger and younger. Not so long ago, players’ parents were close to Bob’s and my ages, and their kids (the Indians players) were about the ages of our kids. But over time, the parents of the players have gradually become closer to our now grown children’s ages, and the Indians players are now the ages of our grandkids! All this seems to have happened overnight.

And while I’ve become increasingly aware that the parents seem to be getting younger, I’ve conveniently ignored the real reason this appears to be so – Bob and I have gotten older!

I easily can rationalize my unawareness of this thing that should be so painfully obvious. Because the age of an Indians player as well as his parents’ ages have remained relatively constant over the years, I never gave it a second thought that Bob and I had not stayed the same ages too! (Great concept. Faulty logic!) As days turned into months, months into years, in my mind we simply had remained blissfully frozen in a time warp, never having blown out even a single birthday candle!

Truth is, since Bob began coaching the Indians, we HAVE blown out lots of birthday candles – thirty-one years worth to be exact. In fact, “Happy Birthday” has been sung to us so many times that Bob now has coached against young men HE once coached; former players have kids playing baseball; and parents of former players cheer for grandkids up to bat.

Ever so slowly, days have turned into months, months into years. Years have slipped by almost without notice, leaving behind decades of memories frozen in time and Bob and I wondering “How the heck did the time go by so quickly?”

For many of us, twenty-first century life can be summed up as: WAY. TOO. BUSY. Family, work, school, lessons, games, groceries, laundry, the gym, meetings, practices —oh, and hopefully a little time set aside for eating and sleeping. Constantly being bombarded with so many first-world demands can feel suffocating. Sometimes we barely can catch a breath! Add to this technologies, gadgets and gizmos that enable and entice us to be ever-available, ever-multitasking, and it’s easy to see why we are ever-exhausted.

I don’t know about you, but every now and then, in the midst of the mania, I need to take a nano-second to just “be.” To sniff the air after a thunderstorm; listen to birds chirping at dawn; gaze at the constellations at night – watch a sun set.

I know first-hand that this isn’t something everyone is automatically wired to do. It certainly isn’t in my Indians-coach husband’s DNA. He usually can’t slow down long enough to soak in the little things I find so refreshing and inspiring. But a few weeks ago, during a particularly intense game, the most wonderfully unexpected thing happen. Time-out was called. The Indian players hurried to gather around their coach for instruction, and then – they all looked skyward where brilliant red, pink and purple streaks had been painted across the evening sky. “Take a look at that sunset,” someone heard my husband say to his team. And then just like that, it was over.

The game resumed. Our team eventually won, and the “breath-taking” time-out was forever inked in the score book.

Last evening was a pretty rough outing for the Indians. Losses never feel good. A 20-2 loss feels lousy. It may even feel like the worst thing that could ever happen.

It’s not.

Rational people understand that losses in athletic competition are inevitable. The key thing often overlooked though is not giving disproportionate focus to or exhausting braincells on evaluating losses. They’re merely moments – single points in time from which we can learn something of value, then must quickly move on, better in some way for having had the experience.

Morgan Wooten, arguably one of the nation’s best high school basketball coaches, sums it up well. “You learn more from losing than winning.” Okay, nothing noteworthy there. Haven’t we all heard that a thousand times? But it’s the simplicity of his next words that should inspire us. “You learn how to keep going.”

The most important take-away from any loss is finding a way to move on!

So “keep going” Indians! Refuse to dwell on last night’s (or any) loss. Deny permission for a loss to become a defeat. Win or lose, that’s the attitude that will define you as winners of the highest caliber, whether on or off the field!