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August 7, 2012

Prospects Will Break Your Heart

The Lowest Levels of the Game

by Jason Parks

With a planned trip to watch complex league action scrapped due to an upper-respiratory infection and an intense case of adult tonsillitis that my doctor deemed too contagious for commercial airline travel, I was forced to spend more time watching New York-Penn League baseball, which is a step above the complex league and not 2000 miles away. It’s a good league with legit talent, but when you prefer watching teenaged Dominicans in the presence of sparse congregations, sitting in stadiums watching adults [by most accounts] loses some of its luster.  I don’t want to come off as an ageist or a developmentalist (admit it, you like this term); rather, I just have a particular preference, and when you geek up to engage in that preference, settling for something else is unfulfilling, regardless of the surface fulfillment.  I love scouting the New York-Penn League, but I already put a ring on the finger of my complex league sweetheart, and I’m monogamous despite having a wandering eye.

Last weekend, while walking to my neighborhood coffee place to overpay for some cold, caffeinated swill, my eyes caught a pack of youths dressed in matching apparel entering the local subway stop. My casual curiosity overcame my iced-coffee objective, and before I realized it, I was standing on the platform next to the top three players on the Dragons, a pre-teen Little League team that had a game that afternoon. The uniforms were fashion-forward, with charcoal tops and white pants with a darker charcoal stripe down the seam. The ball caps featured a large, white letter D in a confident font on a dark gray base; the cap shared the same charcoal gray as the pant stripe, but sun exposure had faded the color, leaving an aesthetically pleasing hue that resembled pewter. I assumed the boys were in the 10-12 age bracket based on their physical appearance and topics of discussion on the subway platform, which lacked the sophistication of a young teenager.

Under the label of social interest and curiosity, rather than straight-up creepiness, I followed the youth team [The Dragons] four train stops deeper into Brooklyn, where a few blocks from the stop lived a park, and on that park was baseball diamond, and on the diamond the Dragons and their shades of charcoal were scheduled to play some team in Target red uniforms without a team name on the garment. I might not be able to fly to Arizona to study the projection of my choosing, but th