The Pecan Park Eagle

Former Astro Norm Miller, 2010.

Former Astros outfielder spoke to our Larry Dierker Chapter of SABR last night. His speech lit a fire that almost burns by spontaneous combustion for most of us elder folk. The topic, put simply, is the subject of kids and baseball today. It’s a  much bigger subject than baseball alone.

Miller began his talk with the disclaimer that he knows nothing about baseball’s history or the rules, claiming to be just a guy who played the game. As most of you know, you need to watch out when you hear that kind of opening disclaimer by a public figure in a public talk. It usually means you are about to take “a good old country lawyer” spraying of the speaker’s thoughts on the topic at hand. As per thesis, Norm Miller proved himself capable of delivering a ton of words on the subject he sort of chose for himself: Baseball Today.

Norm began with his opening question to the audience: “How do you feel about baseball today?”

Miller proceeded to take us through the facts that he was an old school Southern California guy who participated in baseball, football, basketball, and surfing during their appropriate seasons and times of day, but that baseball today is more about kids being controlled into playing baseball 24 hours a day, twelve months per year, and all in the parents’ invested hopes that the training experience will lead to a successful professional career in the big leagues. He mentioned the Select Baseball program as an approach that panders to that exalted expectation.

Norm also talkeed about his brief experience coaching in Select before he fully realized what he was getting into and being blown away by the attitude of so many kids he tried to coach. These kids on Norm’s watch resented being told what to do and some had the kind of sailor-vocabulary mouths to express themselves on the subject. One kid walked away from a practice order from Miller. When Miller then tried to stop him, the kid just looked up at Norm and said something like, “Get out of my way, you blankety-blank old man!”

Norm says it took all he had within him to keep from whacking the kid, but it proved to be the incident that led Norm to getting out. In general, he now feels that the pressure there to win and get better is so relentless that the kids can’t stand it, even though the parents seem to be buying into the hope that their child’s participation is going to lead to a big breakthrough career in baseball.

To me, it all simply sounded like too much baseball for all the wrong reasons. Those of us from the sandlot generation played the game all day during the season because we chose it for ourselves. We weren’t playing the game for the purpose of becoming big leaguers, even though we dreamed a lot about that sort of thing. There was no pressure to get better or die.

We simply had the good fortune back in the day to have grown up in a world in which it was still safe for kids to play in the neighborhood on their own without any over-the-shoulder supervision from all the adults in our lives. Because we did live in that safer world, parents didn’t feel so much that they had to control and supervise our time and guide our activities as preparations for the adult world to come.

Most of us got the message: It’s up to you to learn something that will allow you to support yourself when you’re grown. You have some talents inside, but it’s up to you to find out what they are and to then develop them by your own dedication to learning. College is a good way to go, but you’re going to have to help find a way to pay for it and, even if you get there through college, you are still going to have to decide what it is you want to do and make the most of your talents and opportunities. Not having an honest way to take care of yourself is the only unacceptable outcome of your childhood.

Pretty basic stuff was at play for us, but we got it.

Norm Miller, MLB, 1965-74.

Now the combination of an unsafe world and the additional discretionary resources of ambitious parents seem to be taking over the lives of many kids. And that’s really too bad. Way beyond the loss of the sandlot itself, kids have lost the relatively safe opportunity to simply work things out on the street with other kids without adult involvement. It’s really too bad.

Parents today can’t buy the kind of healing childhood experiences that our post World War II generation got for free.

Thank you, Norm Miller, for reminding us on the larger plane of what was so important about the sandlot. It went way beyond baseball alone to everything we did and tried to become.

By the way, Norm Miller has written and self-published a book recently on his big league experience. It’s entitled “To all my fans…from Norm Who?” You may purchase the book over the Internet or through your local bookstore.