‘I Think the Other Parents Are Bribing My Son’s Baseball Coach’
Dear Emily,
I think parents in my 8-year-old’s travel baseball team are paying off the coach to let their kids pitch and have the better positions. The team was a no-cuts team, and the promise was that it was about skill building and learning — yet we’re halfway through the season, and the preference for these kids (some of whom are pretty obnoxious and none of whom is a baseball phenom) is obvious. On a holiday weekend recently, the primary kids who pitch left early, so my child got to pitch for 1.5 innings; he struck out five batters but has not gotten to pitch again.
How do I get to the bottom of this? (Please note, my spouse thinks I’m insane. Yet this strikes me as a group of parents who are used to forking over money for just about everything they want.)
—Three Strikes and You’re Out
Dear Three Strikes and You’re Out,
All my knowledge of baseball, kids’ and otherwise, derives from repeated childhood viewings of A League of Their Own and Bull Durham, and to be honest, I wasn’t paying much attention to the game itself in either of those. So I consulted a dad I know who’s a longtime veteran of kids’ baseball. Right off the bat (sorry), he cast doubt on your theory that some of these rich, horrible parents are directly paying off the coach to give their 8-year-olds an advantage. It would be wildly unethical and, maybe more to the point, hard to finesse. (I’m imagining a dad giving the coach a firm congratulatory handshake while slipping him a wad of hundreds.) No, what they’re likely doing is more subtle, and though it may not qualify as straight-up unethical, it’s certainly icky: According to Baseball Dad, it’s common for coaches to offer private lessons to members of their teams and to reward the kids who sign up for those lessons with better positions, maybe because their skills have improved with extra practice or maybe because it’s a tacit form of payola. If you want your kid to pitch more and you’re willing to be ruthless and you don’t mind spending $50 an hour or more for private lessons from a jerk, you could just capitulate to the crooked system. (But, uh, please don’t do that.) Or you could complain to the coach, but since he’s awful, that’s likely to do more harm than good.
I will say, though, whenever I have the impulse to try to get my kid out of a situation that just kind of sucks, I often either wind up making the situation worse or spinning my wheels fruitlessly. Case in point: My older son’s fourth-grade teacher has a policy that her students don’t get recess unless they’ve completed all their homework. Since she assigns a ton of homework, it’s hard for my kid to stay on top of his workload. And often we would rather let him relax — read a book he enjoys, go outside in nice weather, even play Minecraft — rather than constantly have to be homework enforcers. After he lost recess the week after spring break because he hadn’t completed all of his spring-break work packet (a string of words that shouldn’t exist, IMO), my husband wrote the teacher a thoughtful email about what a great teacher she is and how much my son is enjoying her class but asking her to please ease up on the recess policy. After all, it’s the only time he gets to socialize with his friends, etc. The teacher sent a polite but terse email back saying that if he doesn’t want to spend recess doing homework, he should … do his homework. Since then, I’d say my kid has lost recess more often, not less.
You want your kid to get more time on the mound, but I would stop and think twice before trying to intervene here. It may be that your son is learning something from his experience on this team, but instead of skill building it’s more along the lines of “Life’s not fair.” We’d certainly like life to be fair for our kids, but our influence goes only so far — and that’s probably for the best.
I think your best option is to ride out the rest of the season and then move on to a different team next season. We’re nearing the end of the school year, so the recess-banning teacher will soon be in our rearview (sure to be replaced with some fresh tribulation next year). Ultimately, all we could do about that particular injustice was tell our kid we sympathized with his plight and stay patient every time he complained. Rather than pay for lessons or complain to the coach, just talk to your son about what he’s enjoying and what he’s finding frustrating about being on this team. Knowing you’re there to listen to him and affirm his own sense of right and wrong is the most important thing you can do for him right now. Best of all, it’s free!
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