Rounding Third
That bit of boyhood suffering doesn’t compare, though, with what I went through later, when my eldest son joined a team and together we experienced the petty mendacity of a certain kind of baseball parent. These were the fathers who saw their boys as a second chance at greatness or a means to revenge or a conduit for any number of pathetic fantasies: the cadre of damaged souls who alternately browbeat their own kids and beat back the kids of others who might threaten their place in the lineup. By means of networking and various forms of bribery, these guys organized themselves into a daddy mafia that served admirably to ruin everything for everybody. There’s a great vicious play to be written about Little League.
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Which is not to say it’s a goof. George Wendt might easily have gotten away with turning Don into a near cousin of his Saturday Night Live Bears fan. Might have been congratulated for it, in fact. Instead he builds Don into a vivid soul–alternately self-aware and blind, hidebound and open, generous and slightly savage. Matthew Arkin’s Michael is less distinct, perhaps in part because more of the weight of Dresser’s calculations falls on him. But he never succumbs to the yuppie stereotype signaled by his tan khakis. Unexpectedly, perhaps, this show respects itself and comes off well as a result. I just wish to hell it had blown the lid off Little League.
