Traveling
For months and months I've been trying to distill an analogy to accurately describe it.
What is up with this phenomenon of kids baseball that they call "travel ball?"
This is where kids are yanked from their community recreational baseball leagues to form private AAU teams, which compete in regional weekend tournaments that are supposed to represent the "best of the best" in your metropolitan area.
Something has always felt a little ... empty ... about the whole thing.
I couldn't describe why. It's just felt that way.
But now I think -- with the Gamecocks back in the College World Series and agonizingly close to winning its second national championship in a row -- I've finally put it together.
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Earlier this spring, I took the boys to see the defending National Champions.
There is a spirit within this. This is our school. We're loyal to our school because ... it's our school. We identify with a common purpose.
These college players are heroes to the kids, who take their hats and balls and game programs and line up in droves along the right field line after the games to beg for autographs or a picture.
The players are generally local -- coming from communities like Sumter, Greer, Mauldin, Florence. Ordinary places. Places that speak to the sport's ingrained culture in our state.
They're from places that any of these kids could be. And they picked this place.
The kids make little distinction between the college players' popularity and that of a Major League player.
But here's what's probably more important, and it's what provides these players the adoration and interest they enjoy: Their following is less about them and more about the institution they are representing.
They play a part of something much larger than themselves.
We as fans and alumni of the University of South Carolina don't necessarily care who they are in the end. Yet through our mutual connection with our larger institution, these guys become special to us.
We feel like we're in it with them. And our passion shines brightest upon whoever puts the jersey on.
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I was tasked some months back to do the Opening Day story for thee local Class A professional baseball team, the Greenville Drive.
The "Drive." It's the corporate-driven branding designed to tie into the area's automotive industry. Not quite as compelling -- or risky -- a mascot as a Gamecock.
I was interviewing these guys and I'm getting the "Glad to make it out of spring training and make it on a minor league team" and "This is my chance to show that I belong at a higher level."
They didn't grow up wanting to play for the Greenville Drive. Who would? Some aren't even sure where this place is. They're here to prove to the Red Sox that they belong somewhere else.
I go to a minor league game ... I don't watch it. It's a sideshow, a party. There is no emotional connection. If the hometown team commits five errors and loses, I'll laugh at the circumstances of it all.
As I talk to these guys, I want a little more.
Opening Day. A beautiful multimillion-dollar park. This is a higher level to live your dream, right?
It is ... but they're hesitant.
Ask them more and you'll find they live their dreams more in the past.
I thought it would be interesting for them to tell me where they hail from.
These guys didn't go to college.
They were too good.
In baseball, if you're top-shelf talent, you generally skip college and head into a life of traveling on buses and playing in towns like Asheville and Charleston and Greenville.
High school as an identity? Maybe.
But what is it that speaks almost universally? I believe you find what you're looking in that most often when you ask people about their childhood.
What T-ball team did you play for? What was its name? Who are you truly representing today as your name is called for starting line-up?
One player, who grew up New Orleans -- the Lockport Recreation T-ball Tigers, for those keeping track -- talked about being recruited by LSU out of high school. A part of him admits a little regret in not going.
But the money's not there. They don't pay for you to play in college -- except maybe the scholarship -- but even those in college baseball oftentimes don't cover the full ride.
It's a conscious choice -- you're good enough to go to the minor leagues, but you know you're just going to ride a bus with the Everett Aquasox or the Savannah Sandnats.
You trade in the ping of aluminum bats for the crack of a wooden one.
But that distant prize that only a small percentage ever claim is always there - the Boston Red Sox. The Green Monster. Ted Williams and Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez.
In college, you're adored by a base of true believers. The competition in terms of talent isn't as difficult (a minor league team is generally going to manhandle a college team) but the competition in spirit and purpose are.
All that to say ...
I heard a Gamecock baseball player interviewed by someone not long ago and they talked about this college team the Gamecocks were about to play and how it had a load of talent drafted by Major League Baseball.
How in the world could they ever stand up to such a challenge?
The player -- who wasn't good enough to get to the minor leagues but in the past four years has built his legacy as one of the university's greatest players of all time and now finds himself drafted to an MLB team -- made the comment, "We played against these types of players in high school, and we held our own."
That's when it hit me. I've got it figured out.
These Gamecock players -- and players for other baseball powerhouse colleges -- are rock stars.
But the truth is that, for the most part, you can bus the Myrtle Beach Pelicans in and just about any minor league team and they will beat those college boys.
There would be little joy in it for the pros -- because they've entered the realm where the joy has been sacrificed for professionalism.
And here is the parallel ...
College baseball is the rec league of 20 year olds.
Travel teams are the minor leagues of 10 year olds.
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In kids recreation baseball, you represent your community -- a suburb, a town, a rural county.
It's come one, come all. There is no resume, just a minimal check for uniforms and umpires and property taxes to subsidize keeping up the fields.
The jerseys can simply have the name of your community, or maybe it mimics the Major League teams.
You spend five years in the league, often more, and over time you go out to the park and by the time your kid is 11, you know everybody.
Teams aren't allowed to stick together. You'll be playing against your friend who you won a championship with the year before.
The disparity in talent is pronounced. You can have a kid strike out 10 batters, then he reaches his pitch limit and another kid comes in and gives up 10 runs.
It's part of the chaos and comedy that make kids baseball so entertaining.
At the same time, as they develop, it begins to get frustrating.
A kid fields the ball at shortstop like a pro, but the 1st baseman can't ever catch it.
So parents pull their kids out and play "travel ball."
The tournaments are expensive. Parents have to pay admission. They are slickly produced.
The teams are finely tuned machines. There is no mercy -- relief might only come on the 10-run rule that leaves a losing team humiliated (yet, that's an outcome you accepted as part of the risk when you signed up).
They have fancy jerseys. And, interestingly, they have minor league sensibilities -- the Destroyers or the Dirt Devils or, in my son's case, the Sidewinders.
With a travel team, a coach has free reign not only over the name, but the players he picks.
They stay together -- yet you soon realize that the culture of winning can strain what would otherwise be normal relationships with your adult peers. And soon enough, the kids aren't together anymore.
In this area, a plush farm of nationally elite baseball talent, there has developed a neurotic urge for parents anxious to "keep up."
Parents talk about preparing their son to make the high school team and mention the dream of a college scholarship.
If you're playing rec, you're just not keeping up.
It becomes a status symbol --saying the word "my sons plays on a travel team."
I resisted my son joining this exclusive club.
I didn't want him to lose the joy of playing a sport he loves.
But with the exodus of talent, I soon realized that it wouldn't be much fun to effortlessly strike out the kid whose parents told him he had to play rec ball this year for the first time because he plays too many video games.
A year to this day, my son pitched a no-hitter for his 10-year-old All-Star team.
There was a lot of talk about it in our league, among parents and kids who've played together for half a decade.
It made the community newspaper.
But here's the thing: The only reason anybody cared is because what he did represented the community he played for.
Mauldin, a suburb of Greenville, vs. Dacusville, a rural mountain area near Clemson University.
If he had done this in some random, indistinguishable tournament that matters only to the people who paid their way into it, it would mean so much less.
And therein lies the distinction ...
What these college guys play for is what my son played for.
They're representing something larger than themselves.
And that's something to cherish.
