Like most young boys growing up I was coerced by the forces of evil, also known as my father, into participating in Little League Baseball. In retrospect, I’m surprised that I survived.

My baseball career started fairly young where both boys and girls were on the field together and an adult was brought in to pitch the ball underhanded to the children. This was likely a safety precaution to lower the chances of someone being hurt. However this logic was counteracted by the fact that the games were held at a baseball diamond nestled deep within the grounds of a local mental institution.

It wasn’t enough that I had to worry about playing well and winning the game, but I also had to deal with possibility that one of my teammates could be dragged off the field by the inhabitants of the mental hospital. For whatever reason, most of the patients living there were allowed free roam of the place, and numerous times we were forced to stop our games while the guy who thought he could fly ran out into the middle of everything shrieking at the top of his lungs.

The doctors in the white coats would soon race to the rescue, sedate him, and walk him back inside so that we could continue. At the end of the game it never mattered which team won or lost because everyone was too emotionally scarred to really care. I was never an outstanding baseball player and the only skill sets that I ever really developed in Little League were stealing bases and running from the crazies.

Eventually we grew up and the girls graduated to playing softball while the guys upgraded to fast pitch baseball where my peers were now the ones chucking a rock-hard, rubber-coated piece of cork at my face. This was the beginning of the end for me. The coaches got more serious and the testosterone levels were kicked up a notch. Suddenly the days of standing in the outfield daydreaming and hoping a psychopath didn’t waylay me were a thing of the past.

Since I was quite small and fast I was always counted on to reach a base and then eventually score a point for the team. Even though I was gifted in speed and balance I completely lacked the ability to hit the ball initially. This drove my coach mad. So much so that he once spent an entire practice teaching me how to bunt the ball in hopes that I could get on base and then begged me to retain the information until the next game. I was so terrible at batting that I had earned myself a sort of reputation. Each time that I got up to the plate, the pitcher would call his entire team to move in closer knowing very well that if I hit the ball it would be a complete accident on my part. In order to amuse themselves, the pitchers of all the other teams decided that rather than pitch the ball to me, they would start throwing it at me, seeing if they could hit my rail thin frame and shatter me like a glass vase.

Since getting smacked with the ball equaled getting on base, my coach was never happier and I was able to consistently score many points for the team and we would win game after game. My lack of actual baseball skill paired with my uncanny ability to always be hit with a baseball at forty miles an hour netted me respect from the coach, respect from my team, and an MVP award at the end of the season. Of course, with all the bruises I was getting, I’m sure my schoolteachers assumed that my parents were mercilessly beating me at home.

Eventually I realized two things: The first was that maybe baseball wasn’t for me, and second, I wanted to live to see the age of sixteen. Shortly after that I quit the team to go look for something a little less violent. I enrolled in Tae Kwon Do classes instead.

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