My first hat of belonging

As we know it so happened that the Pirates home opener occurred in the midst of Holy Week. Showing I have some priorities, I chose to blog on the events of Holy Week and offered not hardly a whisper about baseball. It's killing me.....so, a brief blog on the great joy of baseball.

When I was a kid there were no girls softball leagues. If a girl wanted to play, she played baseball. In the South Buffalo Little League, I broke the gender barrier to play and was part of the league's expansion team, the T-BIRDS. We were the sons and daughter of steelworkers; we were the kids who played in fields with rocks for bases and wore jeans and sweatshirts and used our brothers' gloves. We were the team that had the chubby kid who played the tuba, the pipsqueak kid who was smaller than the wooden bats, and....yes....we had the girl.

One of the highlights for any Little Leaguer is the day you get your team hat. The fighting T-BIRDS wore maroon caps emblazoned with a white capital "T." From the moment we got our hats, we proudly wore them every day to school. We were the T-BIRDS!

Our first game was against the Comets, with their orange hats with a black "C" (you may think it strange that I remember this, yet, ask any former Little Leaguer a similar question). With great hope and the confidence of our weeks of practice, we took the field with vigor!

At the end of four innings we had scored 9 runs......unfortunately, our opposition, those Comets, had scored.....54......it's true.....I was there..... It was so bad that every kid on our team who could at least make the throw to home plate pitched. The game was an eternity of athletic embarrassment and even though some of the parents of the Comets players volunteered to park their trucks around the field and turn on the headlights, wiser heads prevailed and the game was called. Blessed be nature's light cycle.

Shell-shocked we slouched off the field to the echoing chant of sore winners everywhere, "Two, Four, Six, Eight who do we appreciate? T-Birds....T-Birds...." We were embarrassed and hung our heads.

The major question facing each of us was what would we wear on our heads the next day? Even in the world of land-line phones, we knew that word of our thumping would have spread quickly and we had quickly become the league laughing stock. After such a spanking, do we risk more ridicule and wear the T-BIRDS cap to school in front of our peers?

I spent a restless night weighing my options.

The next morning, as I prepared to leave the house, I reached back, grabbed my T-BIRDS cap, placed it on my head and walked up the hill to catch the bus. Boarding the bus, the jeers and jokes began. I did a quick glance around the bus and it was then I saw it --- three of my teammates sporting their maroon caps with the white "T!"

When I got to school, the sarcastic laughter alerted me to the rest of my team....each wearing their T-BIRDS baseball caps and when noticing their teammates also wearing their caps raised their heads up ever so slightly.

That maroon cap with a white "T" was my first hat of belonging. Though we were an expansion team of misfits, we were a team. We belonged. We mattered to each other. We were part of something.

Although we lost every game that season, each and every member of the T-BIRDS continued to wear our ball caps each day and every day, after each loss. We belonged.

sj;