Our Stitches
What follows is a copy of the speech I gave to the New Jersey State Championship Banquet in Berkeley, New Jersey the other week:
“I would like to thank Bob Everett, Berkeley Little League, and Little League International for allowing me to speak to you tonight about the importance of community baseball.
We all need a change of scenery–a change of focus–to maintain a balance in our lives.
Every young person needs positive outlets and activities, outside of the classroom, outside of their home, outside of their handheld device, to maintain that balance.
With budget cut-backs by school districts and by local governments, the number of positive outlets available to our youth and teenagers is shrinking.
Sadly, some school districts and local governments are not only cutting back on their own youth sports programs, but are threatening volunteer based community programs one way or another, sometimes by charging skyrocketing fees to use their fields or facilities. This is having a devastating impact on community baseball programs and other youth sports outlets all across our nation.
Parents, let me ask you something: how many opportunities are there out there in your hometown that allow any child, regardless of skill level, to play a sport through the age of eighteen? Not many I suspect, maybe only one, maybe it’s just Little League.
Community baseball, by its own definition, creates an opportunity where every child, regardless of skill level, can play baseball in their hometown. And in order for community baseball to work, in my view, it calls for sacrifices, by everyone involved. They say that baseball is the only sport in which a sacrifice is truly appreciated. Well, everyone has to hit a sacrifice fly in order for community baseball to work. When that happens, everyone wins
I applaud all of you in this room–the players, the parents, the volunteers, and government officials–who continue to work incredibly hard to enable their community baseball programs to survive and thrive.
Perhaps Norman Rockwell said it best. He said, we are at our best when everybody realizes that “they have a responsibility to everybody else.”
Great things can be accomplished for the benefit of everyone when we all embrace our responsibilities to everyone else.
Based on a true story, my novel Saving Babe Ruth is about one man’s struggle to save his community baseball program. Community baseball is dying in his hometown and only he, along with his team of outcasts, can save it. It’s a crazy story that seems fitting for the craziness of youth sports today, but it’s based on a true story.
Over the past few months, people from all over the country have written me to share their stories that parallel, to some degree, the storyline in Saving Babe Ruth, about how community baseball is being threatened.
You will simply not believe what is going out there and that’s understandable because our perceptions have not caught up with the reality of what is happening behind the scenes in youth sports.
I see this in the reviews of Saving Babe Ruth. While reviewers and readers have had high praise for the book, a few mistakenly think a single event or a character isn’t quite believable, even though they are real, or more real than imagined.
The book is dedicated to league volunteers everywhere who literally have to battle every day to keep a community baseball league afloat. We must protect and honor these volunteers because a league and a community can’t survive without them.
While volunteers in baseball leagues don’t save people from burning fires like firemen, they do prevent fires from being set in the first place if kids are otherwise occupied. While these volunteers don’t foil armed robberies in action like police officers, they do prevent robberies if kids are on the ball field, or involved in some positive outlet of their choice.
Babe Ruth once said, “Without baseball, I’d either be in the penitentiary or the cemetery.” The same can be said for many of the youth in our nation. Baseball can and is a real life changer. It’s no wonder that Babe Ruth also said, “I won’t be happy until we have every boy in America between the ages of six and sixteen wearing a glove and swinging a bat.”
Now you understand the title to my book, Saving Babe Ruth. We need to save community baseball as a positive outlet for all children.
Here’s why.
Baseball is an experience that brings people together. It can forge connections between siblings, between husbands and wives, between parents and their children, between grandparents and their grandchildren. But baseball goes beyond your family. It can connect your family to your communities, with other families. Think about it. How many teammates and families do you know today in this building today because of baseball? Think about all of the different kids and families back home that you know because of baseball.
Community baseball was a social media network long before facebook and twitter.
We all have the ability to touch one another’s lives, to enrich them through baseball, to do this in person in the great outdoors. We’ll never to fully be able to impact the lives of others as well over the phone, through social media, or simply through texting. Technology has its limits.
Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager and the lead character of Moneyball, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in early July. He said that Statcast (a 3-D tracking system that provides detailed metrics on the locations and movements of the ball, the players, and even the umpires) is going to change baseball all the way down to the youth level. He said, “Technology will transform the social fabric of sport.”
I don’t know too much about the Statcast tracking system, but I don’t think it’s programmed to raise our children or to support our communities. I have no idea what Billy Beane might mean when he suggests that this type of technology will transform the “social fabric of sport” as it pertains to community baseball, but I doubt it’s going to create a new fabric that holds community baseball together. That’s up to us.
Billy Bean’s article got me thinking about baseball and what it might represent. You see, I think we are all like baseballs in a way, but not like baseball in the Billy Bean article. A baseball is held together by its stitches and we are held together by our stitches too. The stitches in our lives are not our performance metrics or some new technology application. The stitches represent the life lessons we learn, in and outside of baseball that hold us together– day in and day out–over the course of our lives.
While we all go through some adversity in our lives, we are all held together by our stitches. Like a baseball, sometimes we can soar to great heights, sometimes we can take funny hops, we can take bad hops too, sometimes we can get dirty, but if we are strong, our stitches hold us together to face another day.
Our stitches are given to us by our family, our friends, our neighbors, and by people in our community, even by people even outside of our communities who have the power to touch and impact our lives in ways they never imagined.
Let me tell you a story.
My son, who is in college now, played baseball for fourteen years and hopes to return to the sport one day. We forged a bond through baseball. He found a lot of stitches himself along the way. I couldn’t provide them all. No parent can. We rely on other people to provide our stitches and sometimes you find them when you least expect it, like the one my son found one day in Florida, a little over ten years ago.
We’ve attended many spring training camps over the years in Florida. It was in February 2003 or 2004, and we were at a local camp. Kids were begging the professional baseball players for baseballs from behind the backstop while the players were doing some bunting practice. My son, who around 10 years old at the time, was standing off to the side, not saying anything, just watching the boys beg, wondering, perhaps, if he should be begging too.
In the midst of all this, one professional ballplayer abruptly stopped his practice and turned around. He came over to talk to the boys who were now silent as he approached. He held the chain link backstop and said with a smile, “You guys should really be quiet and watch what we’re doing here. You might learn something.”
With that, my son returned to the stands to sit down beside my family to observe and learn for the next hour plus. And that’s what he’s done at every spring training camp since then.
My family has talked about that day off and on for the past decade. That ballplayer gave my son a stitch that day, a stitch he carried with him for the next ten years, a stitch he carries to this very day. You see observing and learning is what he did at spring training and he took that life lesson with him to his research jobs over the past two summers.
Today, instead of throwing baseballs at gloves, he’s throwing nanoparticles filled with therapy drugs at cancer cells at one of the most advanced nanotechnology facilities in the world. Observing and learning is at the very heart of what he does now.
And if you are wondering about the name of that ballplayer who reached out to touch my son that day, you might recognize his name. He was in spring training in Port. St. Lucie and played for the New York Mets at the time. His name is Al Leiter.
I know Mark, Al and the entire Leiter family mean so much to this community. Mark, please thank Al for reaching out to my son day and for giving him a stitch in life.
I hope all the young players here learn some life lessons and collect some stitches while they play in this special tournament. So tonight, I want to help players remember their time here.
I want to give every player a brand new baseball, a very special baseball that I want you to use in this tournament, but not in a way you might think.
I don’t want you to throw this baseball or hit it. Instead, I want you to carry this baseball with you and when you see someone do something special, I want you take this baseball to that person or player and ask them for their signature. That person can be a parent, a family member, a player on your team or another team, a coach on your team or another team, an umpire, a fan, a volunteer, or anyone you want to recognize. Use this baseball to reach out and connect with someone.
I hope this baseball will serve to remind you of all the good things and stitches you discovered here at the New Jersey State Little League Championship in the years to come.
In closing, I want to wish every team the very best in this very special tournament and I want to thank you all for allowing me to be a part of it.”