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Surely, somewhere, Al Silver was smiling.
It was a picturesque spring day Sunday. Sunny. Temperatures in the 80s. My two offspring and several of the younger boy's Land O'Lakes Little League teammates pranced around the turf of spanking new Bright House Networks Field in Clearwater, the just-opened spring training home of the Philadelphia Phillies. As part of a community clinic, they and dozens of other children received instruction from a roster of retired Major League Baseball players, including Paul Blair, Jody Reed, Darrell Evans and Jeff Torborg.
They ran bases, they pitched, they fielded ground balls and pop flies and they hit off a tee in the cages beneath the grandstand.
One problem, one of the ex-big leaguers, told the hitters: Most coaches and parents make the mistake of putting the batter right next to the tee. That is incorrect. The tee should be in front of the batter, so he or she hits the ball with the arms extended fully.
Oh.
Now they tell us. It's the first time, after five seasons of coaching the Bad News Bowens, that someone had shared that wisdom.
And I thought of Silver, the youth sports booster and owner of A-OK Trophies in Land O'Lakes, who had succumbed a day earlier to complications from a stroke.
Silver advocated getting rid of the tee in tee ball, the youngest version of Little League baseball in which children strike the ball off a waist-high stationary plastic tee.
Silver hated it. Let them learn to hit a moving pitch, he said. The fact that so many of us set the tee in the wrong place certainly would have cemented his opinion.
Silver despised the one-handed catch, too. Bad habits, he said. The children learn bad habits from watching the major leaguers.
People know of Al Silver's legacy in Land O'Lakes: the American flags, the holiday decorations, the thousands of trophies distributed to central Pasco's young athletes at the conclusion of each sports season, car shows (T-birds a specialty), chamber functions, breakfast with Santa, and charity work.
But his passion for baseball was at the top of the list. That is my recollection after sitting with Al and his wife, Ida, amid the clutter of their former building, the one demolished in the late 1990s by the widening of U.S. 41. I had come on a December day to talk about the holiday decorations. Such an oddity, a Jewish couple championing the community's Christmas spirit. We ended up talking baseball.
Long before free-agent drafts, multimillion-dollar deals for high school seniors and Billy Beane disciples punching numbers into computers to help decide which kid's on-base percentage would be rewarded with a contract, there were people like Silver.
Bird dogs. They were the volunteer scouts who searched the high schools fields and sandlots for talented players and then pointed Major League organizations toward their discoveries. Silver was a bird dog for the Baltimore Orioles.
He once spotted a high school kid on Long Island. Get here, quick, he said he told the Orioles.
Too late. The Boston Red Sox signed the left-handed hitter first. He became recognized universally by his three-letter nickname.
Yaz.
Carl Yastrzemski had a Hall-of-Fame career as a Boston Red Sox left fielder. Give Silver credit. He appreciated talent.
What he didn't appreciate was the escalating salaries of professional athletes. No wonder he put his focus on youth sports.
Children play for sheer enjoyment. Watch them smile when they make contact. Or slide into every base, including first. Or the first time they squeeze a pop fly into the mitt without dropping it.
Of course, there is one more motivation. At least around our house. They play baseball and other sports for that end-of-the-year presentation. They play for the trophies.
It brings a smile just as wide as the one that accompanies the first base hit.
Unknown to them, the trophies frequently had passed through Al Silver's hands on the way to theirs.