We
saw Clare for the first time in five weeks when she came home Thursday night
ahead of a Friday exposure tournament—a cattle call for high school softball
players—she was attending for Valpo. It
was out in St. Charles, and she didn’t get back until after the Cubs-Cardinals
game; I should note that she and her mother both had run-ins Friday with people
who wanted to know why they couldn’t be Chicago fans and root for the North
Siders. We all had a good laugh on that
one, and talked about the bar on Western Avenue that’s offering free beer for
every Cardinals’ home run. Our kind of
place.
I
had the Mets-Dodgers game on for background.
We talked about the camp—one of the CCIW softball coaches was there and
recognized Clare, saying, “You were pretty good” in a way that let her know she
remembered that walk-off homerun junior year—and something the Valpo coach said
about why so many girls throw poorly; Coach thinks it’s because girls learn to
throw with a softball, which is too big for their hands, instead of a
baseball. Clare blames poor instruction
from fathers (I appear to have earned a pass there) and went on to discuss
remedies, either watches or walls.
My
daughter says girls are told to “hit the wall with the ball,” in other words
pretend there’s a wall behind them and reach for it before going into their
throwing motion. “But that gives them
all sorts of bad mechanics.” Coach Buk
prefers the double-watch approach, whereby the player fielding a ball pretends
she has watches on both hands which she should check before throwing;
apparently, this will lead to a nice, compact throwing motion . Me, I think you take your kid out when
they’re four or five and play catch—first with a wiffle ball, then a
baseball—until they’ve got it down.
Mets over Dodgers,
3-1, and we go to sleep a family one more time.
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