VARIOUS RAMBLINGS OF A BASEBALL PARENT:
I grew up playing the great game of baseball in a time when there weren't many distractions. At least not like the kids of today are faced with.
We didn't have access to and the rampant use of drugs that seems to infect most communities in America today.
We didn't have video games that keep a high percentage of today's youth so preoccupied that their pasty white skin rarely sees enough daylight sun to cause even the slightest skin irritation. Hell, we only had three channels on the television.
We lived in a public housing project in an apartment that had no air conditioning, where the only tolerable air moving around inside was generated by a large attic fan that was recessed in the ceiling of the hallway. It was designed to draw air through the house by way of open doors and windows, which caused the summer nights to be miserable and the days to be down right intolerable. It was little wonder that I spent as much time as humanly possible outdoors.
Our housing project was constructed with a large open field in the middle of a number of duplex apartments that were situated in a circle around it, which allowed for a community recreational area that was utilized by most of the area boys as the community baseball field. Every afternoon until dark and all day on Saturday and Sunday you could find loosely organized "pick-up" baseball games going on where the only requirement for admittance was a willing participant with a baseball glove. It also helped if you could contribute a beat up old baseball bat or a worn, tattered baseball.
I grew to love the game of baseball and worked really hard to be one of the better players in our area. I always pushed my younger brothers to play and excel at the game, which helped to mold them into the hard working, successful and honest people that they eventually became, despite the circumstances that we were forced to endure.
We didn't have access to the high level coaching that is available in the larger populated cities of today, albeit at a price that we wouldn't have been able to afford back then. I was privileged through local community programs to be able to play for a couple of coaches who volunteered their time to the local community, both of whom were upstanding community leaders who influenced and inspired me to deal fairly with others, set goals and work hard to accomplish them. These men did their best to teach baseball to the best of their ability; although, looking back on it, I came to realize that their role in my life reached far beyond the ballpark. Coming from a family where I was the oldest of three boys who had virtually no male roll model to look up to, especially during my impressionable teenage years, I seriously don't know where I would have ended up without the influence and example set by Coach Woody Spiers.
I have worked with, coached and tried to provide the best opportunities available for all of my boys to be able to enjoy, learn from and experience the great game of baseball; although the older ones eventually found other things that they thought were more important and lost interest in the game. I guess that a lot of that is m fault because I spent most of their young lives working in an industry that required me to spend a high percentage of my time working away from home in a harsh environment that afforded me the opportunity to make the most money; although I wasn't able to foresee the toll that it would take on my family life.
THE NEW AGE
All of my older boys showed a remarkable natural ability to play the game, as well as myself' my brothers and most of my cousins. Despite their inherent aptitude for hitting, throwing, running, etc., rarely did they display a long term desire to put in the hours required to give themselves every opportunity for success, until Matthew came along.
At the age of three he seemed to have the uncanny ability to throw a baseball all of the way across the yard, hit a baseball thrown to him and even hit a golf ball crisply across the back field.
He started playing t- ball at 5 or 6 and from that point on, always stood out in the crowd. He would constantly beg me to go outside and play. We would show up an hour early for baseball practice and sometimes stay an hour after everyone else was gone with me pitching to him in the cages or hitting line drive and hard ground balls to him at third base.
He soon displayed a rocket for an arm and the ability to hit the ball hard every time that he came up to bat. By the time that he was 13, he was routinely hitting the ball out of the park. I can remember one batting practice session where he hit 6 out of 7 pitches out of the park with two of them traveling a considerable distance over the top of the scoreboard in left-center field.
At 12, he started playing select/travel ball and quickly became one of the best at the elite/premiere level, going through the entire 14U season at the elite level with over a .500 batting average and the ability to throw the ball close to 80mph.
We went to the 14U Nations World Series in Denver, Colorado where he pitched two one hit ball games, one against a great team from Canada and one against a team from Oklahoma, meanwhile going 3 for 3 in both games.
During the fall of this year, he was noticed by a local showcase baseball organization that plays in the Houston-5A program, which is comparable to an upper high school level, where he quickly was promoted to the 16U squad and has exhibited a high enough level of ability that he has recently played a tournament with the 17/18U squad and has been invited to travel to Florida right after Christmas to be the starting third baseman for the 18U squad in a showcase tournament at the Atlanta Braves Spring Training facility in front of numerous high level baseball scouts; all while being only 14 years old until March 26th of next year.
We have had numerous conversations over the past few years where I have assured him that if he ever gets tired of playing and wants to quit or take a break, that I will stand behind his decision. Matthew is an incredibly motivated kid who is very goal oriented. His goal over the next few years is to maintain a high grade point average and continue to work every day to become a good enough ball player to get into a high level college with a great baseball program so that he can achieve his long term goal to play professional baseball.
