If I was really watching from up there, it was after I'd been pulled off my father's team and brought up to the older, "better" kids' teams that you have to try-out for. I hadn't made it initially, but after a kid dropped off one of those teams, they had space for one more and somehow I got the call.
Regardless, if I was up in that box I was watching my old team's game, coached by my dad because my little brother was still playing on it. It would have been The Orioles. There's a chance that this happened before I changed teams, and maybe I was up at bat or on the field, but either way I was there.
Each team usually had a head coach and one or two assistant coaches, in this case my father was the head coach and the assistant coach was this player Brett's father. He was young, probably 10-20 years younger than my father. He was tall and lanky, a smoker, a little raggedy. Struck me as a townie, but a lot of the dads that showed up to coach were. He didn't smile much, seemed sort of like he had a chip on his shoulder at all times.
I'm just going to keep replaying this as if I was up in the box, so I was looking out this window through a chainlink fence. My father's team was to the left and suddenly there's some shouting from the bench along with some movement. There were usually kids up against the fence yelling and cheering, gripping the fence and shaking it, but it wasn't that.
Two adults yelling. Maybe just one? Brett's dad storming out of the dugout and towards the latched in gate. "I'm sick of this!" I think he was saying? Probably cursing under his breath. My father probably telling him to get out of there? I wish I could remember it more clearly.
But he left the field. There wasn't any commotion after, the game just resumed. I'm sure the 20 or so spectators out in the bleachers were concerned, but everyone seemed to move on pretty quickly.
After the game I asked my father what the issue was, what happened? I'd seen coaches booted from games before for mouthing off to the umpires (pathetic), but never a coach kicking another coach out before.
The answer I got was that...he was swearing? I obviously couldn't hear it from where I was but my dad made it seem like he was cursing out the kids on the team when they were doing poorly, and that he'd been warned.
A day or so later I was reading on the couch in our dining room. My father used to make and take calls up in his office, which had no doors on it, so the conversations would flow down into the rest of the house. That afternoon I heard him talking about this incident at the ball field. It was gentle scolding, something like "You can't be doing that," and it was clear that he was talking to Brett's dad.
The piece of the conversation I remember distinctly, probably because I asked my dad about it later, was that he offered to take Brett's dad out for a beer, just to show no hard feelings and talk it over.
It struck me as a human gesture. Maybe something genetic I inherited, this need to smooth out any rough spots you may or may not have caused.