A Pleasant Blast From the Past

I had given up.

In the world of 10U travel baseball, where there are turf fields, premium home and away jerseys with your name on the back, $300+ Marucci composite metal bats, Bruce Bolt batting gloves, arm sleeves, walk-up songs, and, unfortunately, even sliding mitts, there was one thing that I had not seen yet during our first 25 games this season - a working scoreboard.

Most fields have really nice scoreboards, likely paid for by taxpayers or a generous donation. But it appears that no one wants to commit the focus and time to operating them anymore.

Seeing the scoreboard lit up at my son’s game yesterday took me back to memories of playing ball as a boy growing up in rural Iowa in the 1980s. We didn’t have fancy uniforms; we couldn’t even keep them after the season. Most kids didn’t have their own bat, and when they did, they expected it to last them more than one season.

But one thing we did have was at least one dedicated volunteer every game who loved baseball and took pride in paying attention and doing an excellent job for his community. In those times, it was rare when the scoreboard was not running, not only in our town but in the surrounding towns as well.

When I was 12, our small town hosted our league tournament finals. My mom and dad helped run our youth baseball league, so they were busy getting the field and concession stand ready that day. They set up me, my younger brother, and a couple of our friends with a card table behind the backstop, where we ran the scoreboard and official scorebook for the four championship games across the age divisions. We kept stats, and, after the games, we picked our Coca Cola Classic MVP (winning team) and Nestea Iced Tea MVP (losing team). We named the awards after the free refreshments that we received from the concession stand for helping out. 

Using the GameChanger mobile app, we can now follow the play-by-play of these little league games on our smartphones. Most people view that as progress.

But, while I appreciate the mom on our team who runs the app for us, the results on the phone are typically 2-3 plays behind the action, meaning you can never trust the ball-strike count and the score itself is often in doubt. Not to mention that it’s just another reason for parents to be looking at their phones instead of at their boys out on the field.

Watching how everyone enjoyed the old-time scoreboard yesterday, I argue that we have again lost something along the way toward new technology.

Here’s to hoping that we see more working scoreboards again. I have a feeling that these seemingly small things are important if we want to get back to the days when pride still mattered in this country.