The Pip starting to run after getting a hit 
The Pip about to catch a ball at first base with a runner coming in 
The Pip pitching in a playoff game, with the umpire behind him 
The Pip pitching, with Kate in the background watching 
The Pip pitching, shot from the outfield so you see the batter and catcher 
The Pip starting to run from second to third 
The Pip in uniform and mask looking at the camera 
The Pip looking over his shoulder to complain about me taking pictures 
The Pip concentrating on hitting an incoming pitch 
The Pip jumping with excitement as he and his teammates race for snacks after the final game
A couple of years ago, The Pip played rec baseball at the single-A level, and after basically every game told me “I should be playing at a higher level.” Last year’s season was completely lost to the Covid pandemic, but this year he was on a double-A team, as it turns out with the same coach he had two years ago. I’m not good enough at baseball to do much more than coach first (where you just yell “Run!!!” when the ball is hit), which also allows a good deal of time for my expensive hobby of taking photos. I ended up with a few thousand photos of the team overall, and 70-odd of The Pip that I liked enough to crop and color-correct in GIMP; a selection of the best of the best can be seen in the gallery above.
The AA level is where they start having kids pitch, which was a bit of an adventure. The Pip turned out to be good at pitching, though– he can always get the ball to the catcher in the air, which wasn’t universally true of the kids pitching, and he was accurate enough to almost always get a couple of strikes. In one game, when my parents came up, he struck out all three batters he faced, and in their first playoff game he pitched two innings, striking out five and accounting for the final out by snagging a line drive hit back at him. He spent the rest of that day periodically saying “Hey, can we talk about that catch?”
He’s also a good contact hitter, though doesn’t get as much power as you might expect from his size. There was only one game where he went 0-2; every other game he got at least one hit, and usually two or three. He was starting to hit with a bit more power toward the end of the season, hitting a bunch of doubles.
The team was pretty good, and the experience was generally positive, with minimal examples of the problematic youth sports stuff that people talk about. The final game did leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of the adults, though– the team they played in the league semi-final was pretty stacked, but also did a lot of cheap little stuff to take advantage of the rules. They had one of their good pitchers moved up a few feet from the rubber, because he was technically allowed to do that since he didn’t play on the travel team (The Pip, meanwhile, always threw from the rubber because we wanted him to learn to do it right). And the coach refused to play a last half-inning that would’ve let The Pip’s team bat a final time, because we were about two minutes past the hour-and-a-half limit for starting a new game; this despite having a 12-6 lead, and probably the best pitcher in the league on the mound. (When we ran into coaches from another team getting end-of-season ice cream and said that, they said “Oh, yeah, that’s how we lost to them, too.”)
The kids rallied pretty well, though, as you can see from the last photo in the gallery, where they’re racing to the snacks. And The Pip has been chatting happily about baseball for the last few days; we may go to see a minor-league game this weekend.
Anyway, it was great to be back in the youth sports game, after a weird and miserable 2020. A real “nature is healing” vibe to the whole season.