Summer League and Dominos, 11-years-old
Summer League and Dominos, 11-years-old
2022-04-25
I played a lot of baseball when I was younger. There was the regular Spring Little League which lasted from March to June, and for kids who wanted to keep playing, there was a Summer League.

Most kids where I grew up spent their summers eclectically, with various camps and family vacations scattered across July and August. Because of that, there really weren't enough kids in a single town to make more than a team or two. And rather than that said town just having the same 24 kids play each other for 8 weeks, it would make one larger-than-usual team and send it off to neighboring cities to compete with their own Summer League teams. It was more casual than Spring League, with the large team size allowing for players to take weeks off if they needed to without negatively impacting the rest of the team.

Budgets were slimmer for uniforms and gear. There were fewer coaches. Parents had to pitch in a lot more than they would in the Spring, especially with the traveling. Some games would take place a couple hours from home. There was carpooling and caravanning in order to get those 20 kids to the games.

Summer League was one of the few times my father took a break from coaching. He and my mother might still drive us to practice or a game, and usually watch us if they weren't working. But because they weren't as involved in this league, they could treat it as babysitting if they wanted to visit a friend or take a break from my brother and I for a night.

Dan and I are only seventeen months apart in age, so we were accustomed to playing on each other's teams in the Spring League. He was smaller than me back then, so I might have been able to hit the ball farther, but he was a better pitcher than me and probably faster. We were the only siblings on the team.

I'm not sure what age my parents started leaving us home alone without a babysitter, but one summer evening they knew we had a game up until sundown, and they decided that we could take care of ourselves until they got home around 10 or 11pm from wherever it was they were going. They left us $30 or so to order pizza for dinner after we got home from our game, which some parent would presumably be taking us home from.

The pizza thing—this was a big deal for Dan and I. We loved pizza, but we never got to order it ourselves, and when our parents did get pizza delivered it was from a local shop. Getting to choose where we'd order it opened up the option of getting it from Dominos, which was normally off-limits for some inexplicable reason. In retrospect, it was probably because Dominos was garbage and our local pizza shops were great. We were exposed to Dominos once a month for a special school lunch day, and it was so much better than the awful frozen pizza they'd normally serve in the cafeteria that Dominos became this gold standard to Dan and I. So we knew where we were ordering from after the game, and it was absolutely going to be the highlight of our night.

The game ended probably sometime around 6 or so. I can't remember if we won or lost. The memory I have isn't really tainted by sadness or feeling bad about myself, so I have to assume we won? I do remember losing pretty frequently in Summer League, though, so much so that I think we became immune to it at different points. Summer League didn't carry the weight that Spring League did, either, so it might be that we just didn't care about losing.

Post-game, the idea was floated by the parents to take the team out for dinner—pizza, to Dan's and my mutual devastation. It was very clearly not going to be Dominos, more than likely it'd be some sit-down, fake Italian restaurant off of Route 1 that, by all accounts, was leagues beyond Dominos in terms of quality. But they didn't have Cinnastix (TM).

I was still the older brother back then. I still am now, I know, but once you're the same height and station in life as your sibling, the older/younger dynamic evaporates unless you're really making an effort to keep it alive. All this is to say that I called the shots for us back then, and Dan usually went along with what I said.

I can't remember if I verbalized it or if it was just understood between us, but we did not want to settle for anything less (or better than, more accurately) than Dominos. But we had no way of getting home without our teammates parents, so we were captive for this team-outing. So we'd be there, but we just wouldn't eat.

At the restaurant we sat at a long table, long enough for 15 or so players and a few dads. Someone ordered five or so pizzas for the group, at least enough for everyone to have a couple slices.

I question why this memory comes to the surface so frequently for me, and the best reason I've been able to come up with is that it's a very clear moment for me, in hindsight, where I can say "This points to a weird relationship with food and social norms."

Someone—I don't know if it was a kid or an adult—noticed that my brother and I hadn't taken slices. We'd been trying to just sit there and not be too obvious about it, but we wanted to save our appetite for Dominos. The observation must have bubbled around the group and eventually our head coach, Mr. Solomon, felt the need to say something about it.

"Please, boys," he said. "Eat." He was barely smiling when he said it, it felt right on the edge of admonishment.

I don't know what they thought we were doing. They probably thought we were being polite? Maybe they sensed we were trying to not spoil our appetite for dinner at home—but if that was the case, it makes me feel weirder that he kept pushing for us to eat. What was wrong with us preferring to eat with our family? (Which wasn't the case, obviously, but still.) Why pressure kids to have two dinners?

There was weird stuff between this coach and my dad, weird macho dominance stuff in the Little League circle during the regular season. It got worse when we were older, but as 10 and 11-year-olds it was less overt. Middle-aged men living vicariously through there sons, needing to compete with one another since they couldn't play the sport themselves. Did the coach think our parents told us not to take things from him? That we were being petty on instruction from our parents?
Or did they think we weren't allowed to have pizza, and they wanted to liberate us?

We couldn't advocate for ourselves. Later on in life, after I was able to drive, if I ever found myself in a similar situation, it was so much easier to take myself away from the situation, to go home, to decline to go to the restaurant in the first place, or generally just not feel that pressure from an authority figure to eat because I had more mature reasoning capabilities. But we were kids, we were captive. We wanted our goddamn Dominos.

Dan must have looked at me for guidance, and we each reluctantly ate a slice to placate everyone staring at us. When we got home we still ordered Dominos. We got our Cinnastix. It felt like we were doing something wrong, eating a second dinner. Even at that age we were weight-conscious, being told we'd "get fat" if we ate too much. And there was this other element of wrong-ness, that we were spending our mom's money when we should have just had the free meal with the team. We just got so attached to our plan, looked forward to it. It would have made sense if the team hadn't gone out to eat.

When our parents got home and asked about our evening we mentioned the dinner thing. My mother said something like, "I wish you would have just eaten there instead of ordering Dominos."




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