No Pressure

A funny thing happened today at baseball practice. There are two particular couples that I usually sit with at games, and the dads always bring their boys to practice so I always make small talk with them. There is another dad who usually sits on the fringes, but he's pretty quiet. All of these men have been really nice to encourage Tyler and congratulate him when he gets a solid hit or pitches a good game. (One quick aside: I have told several people this and hope that it doesn't come across as boasting . . . but this season has been particularly fun for Tyler because he is viewed as one of the better players on the team--not that it's going to his head!--and today I found out just how good one dad in particular thinks he is!)

So anyway, at practice we were talking about the playoff tournament and speculating on when it might start. Here's the deal: Tyler has two more regular season games next week and that's as far as our schedule goes. Luckily, there have been no rain-outs this season which means there are no games to make up, because Tyler (and Darcy) are going to church camp the week after next. It suddenly occurred to me that we might be in a little bit of trouble because one of the dads (Mike) said he had heard the tournament would start the Saturday following next week's games. But then another dad (Tom) said that Coach had told him that a couple of teams had had some conflicts or something and would still have games the week after next, so that would leave Tyler in the clear. I piped up and said how relieved I was at that turn of events, and I went on to explain about church camp. Tom jokingly said, "Ooh, church camp doesn't work for us. We need Tyler here." And this other dad, the quiet one (I think his name is Wayne) who had not been a part of the conversation up to this point, chimed in with, "Yeah, you're going to need to go pick Tyler up and bring him to the games." I kind of chuckled at the thought of this pedestal he was placing Tyler on, and I turned to look at him and laugh when I saw his face and realized . . . he wasn't joking. He even repeated his statement: "We've got to have Tyler in the tournament." He was dead serious. How's that for pressure?

I was telling Randy about the conversation when we spoke today and of course his big concern is that if the tournament does start the week after camp, that translates to Tyler having to wait too many days between games and he's likely to get rusty. I said, "Well, maybe you can throw together a couple of teams at camp and play a few games to keep Tyler fresh!" At the very least Randy can have Tyler pitch to him while he's at camp. They get something like five hours of free time each day to do as they please. Problem solved.