Memoir

Ryan Carboni Earth 6/9/09

**__Little League Baseball Made Me a Bitter Shell of a Man__**

2000-2003 are some of the most bitter years of my life. In that short period of 3 years my passion for sports was quickly demolished. Looking back, I really am happy I was terrible at sports. If you want to ride on Ryan Carboni’s train of mediocrity, hop on and keep reading.

I began my brief career of baseball playing t-ball, I tried to purge all memories of it but I remember missing the ball three times and winding up hitting the tee. The tee’s purpose back then was probably to make kids who couldn’t hit the ball feel that they could be part of the team. I still hated practice and playing the sport, but I actually thought it was compulsory for an American boy to play baseball. Much how it is mandatory to serve on a jury or be conscripted.

The next year in first grade, I still continued with my tour of duty. Fortunately, I actually learned to hit pretty well. Probably because I was a bit heftier in my youthful years and that would have gave me more hitting power. Hitting baseballs far means nothing if you can’t field, this was my case. This mostly stemmed from my fear of being hit with baseballs.

The crux of my phobia was a game of catch gone bad. It was when I was playing a normal game of catch with my dad. I had to play catch as my dad probably doesn’t want me to be made fun of for looking like a spazz. Playin ccatch I got hit in the face several times as I in fact was a spazz. Therefore, I would duck out of the way whenever the ball would come near me. This wasn't the least of my problems.

When I reached the next level, AA or A (I don't really care). The newest problem was the pitching machine. This thing had no feelings, emotions, or anything human. It was a robot with the sole intention of hitting me in the face with baseballs. I was even more scared of the ball by then. All of this combined to make my baseball playing terrible.

The final straw was the kids. These were the over competive kids that would give you a real hard time if you did something wrong. Soon it advanced to being avoided during practices and name calling. Names such as uni-brow, or comments about my speech and other thing made me real angry. Later on, I started to do things wrong on purpose just to watch them get all red and angry.

The culmination of all of these things gave me the view that it wasn't mandatory to play baseball. So I took the next year off, and the next, and the next. I really began to be happy not spending the day standing around. Which baseball was, standing or sitting around until the ball came near you.