Of bathrobes and baseball hats

Little Man, as we call our 8-yr-old, came downstairs this morning in his bathrobe and baseball hat as though it were the most obvious outfit in the world-- which brought me back to late yesterday afternoon when the closing hymn of Mass had just sounded its final chord, and 8-yr-old turns to me and says, "Hey, do you think that we could go play baseball?" As if that, too, was the most natural thing in the world-- to turn from Communion to The Ball Diamond-- as if they are both some how equally sacred. Oh. Yes. To my 8-yr-old they are. I turned to him laughing and said, "Is there ever a time when you're not thinking about or wanting to play baseball?" Nonplussed, he replied, "Nope, I would even play baseball with a rolled-up sock in the Dominican Republic." When I started laughing, delighted at his witty comeback, he launched into a precis about how Sammy Sosa grew-up learning to play this most holy of sports. He then started explaining to his brother that Sammy and his friends were so poor that they even used cut-out milk jugs for gloves.

This little foray into 8-yr-old's encyclopediac mind is not our family's first. When we were on vacation in Pittsburgh driving through the West Homestead neighborhood, 8-yr-old began rattling off statistics about the Homestead Grays. Um, who are they? Well, they were a Negro League Team who boasted Jackie Robinson on their roster once-upon-a-time. How about the only player to die of a baseball to the head? Care to know what each MLB ballpark used to be called before the days of corporate overreaching? My little bat boy could fill you in.

What doesn't this kid know? Well, right now, I'm thankful that he doesn't know much about steriod abuse, that he doesn't understand the ridiculously alarming salaries that some of his heros rake in, or what happens to a man when his dreams of baseball stardom don't quite pan out. For right now, his games with neighborhood friends at The Corner, and his books and magazines full of glossy pictures of peaceful stadiums and larger-than-life "Caseys At Bat" suffice to fill his every waking, and I dare say, sleeping moment. And I suppose, at the risk of being blasphemous, it is okay with me that for my little obsessed man that Babe Ruth and Roger Maris sit at the same table as Jesus and Mary and St. Francis. Jesus did say, "Suffer the little children to come unto me" and my guess is that they maybe he wouldn't mind playing a little ball too.