Baseball tryouts

I don't remember how old I was when I tried out for Little League Baseball. Either 7 or 9.

They were real try outs. This was beforethe day that everyone gets a medal, even before the day's of everyone gets to play. It was not only possible to not make it through the Little League selection process, it wasn't all that uncommon to fail in the first tryout.

They were really mean to us kids back in the '50's.

The tryout consisted of fielding 3 ground balls, catching 3 pop up fly balls, and taking 3 swings at bat. Based on that performance the coaches in attendance would hold some sort of draft and select their teams for the season. If you didn't get picked, then well you didn't get picked.

I practiced and prepared for that tryout. It was one of the few times I can remember that my Dad actually sat aside some time and put in the effort to help me. My dad's little brother (who was either 17 or 19 that year) gave me his baseball glove to use and Dad told me he'd buy me one of my own if I made a team.

I went to the tryout alone, riding my bike with my Uncles baseball glove hanging from the handle bars.

I fielded the three grounders and the three pop flys. I don't remember if I caught any of them or not, probably not.

Then it my turn at bat. I left the glove on a bench in the dugout and went to strike out. I do remember three swings and never connecting.

Then I went back to the dugout to wait for them to tell me to try again next year.. My Uncles glove was gone. Somebody had stolen it when I was at bat.

I don't think I was all that disappointed in not making a team. But losing that glove just embarresed me to no end. When next year came along I didn't try out again. Not becuase of the shame of not making the team, I could deal with that just fine. But because I couldn't go through a repeat of having my Uncle's glove stolen from me.

Phil (my Uncle) probably didn't really care about the glove at all. But I didn't know that. And to me having him entrust his glove to me and then me getting it stolen was just the ultimate failure on my part.

Did they lie to Congress? We can't allow that.

At least that's what Congress is saying about baseball players. I was reminded of that when I ran across this old headline from a San Franciso Chronicle from last month (sometimes it takes me a while to look at my RSS feeds).

Congress Seeking Tejada Investigation
Congress asked the Justice Department to investigate whether former AL MVP Miguel Tejada lied to House committee staff when he was interviewed in 2005 in connection with the Rafael Palmeiro steroids case.

Of course the more recent headlines are about Roger Clemens, but it's all the same. Baseball. That's important. We have to get to the bottom of that.

If we let baseball players get away with cheating then it might disrupt the business of some of those off shore sports books, and that would be un-American. We need baseball players to be role models for our children because we have no other options. Who else can our children look up to as role models? Parents? Congressmen? I don't think so.

After all, it's the parents who voted for this batch of weasels we call Congress, so they can't be any smarter than a tree limb. When Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Rice, Powell lied to Congress we didn't have a Congressional investigation. They didn't want to know about it. Because they're a bunch of gutless, spineless, weasels who already knew they were being lied to but were afraid to do anything about it.

And, no it wasn't faulty intelligence. It was lies. Lies to Congress. To the UN. To the American people. Possibly even just lies to themselves.

We know, and knew then, that they were lieing becuase of specific lies from Runsfeld and Powell. Before the invasion of Iraq, they justified it by telling us not just that Iraw had weapons of mass destruction, not just that we knew that beyond any doubt, but that we knew the locations of the WMD's.

That had to have been alie. They did not know where they where. Because if they did know we would not have needed to invade. The lies they told us to justify the invasion, if true, did not justify the invasion, they justified an air strike or possible a targeted invasion with a small force. They lied. It's that simple.

But, let's play baseball.