My brother-in-law's birthday reminds me of a time when slow-pitch softball was all the rage

You can't really see it, I know, but when I was with the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1991, I wrote this feature story about my brother-in-law Jess and some of his longtime softball buddies. Jess is the guy standing in the very middle of that group of seven players.

Today is my brother-in-law Jess' birthday. He was married to my oldest sister Judi from 1972 until she died very unexpectedly in 2009. I was only 2 at the time of their wedding, so Jess has always seemed a part of my life.

Jess was an accomplished athlete at Benedictine High School, and he kept his sports career going through the 1970s and 80s and into the 90s as a slow-pitch softball player in the Cleveland area.

You wouldn't know it nowadays, given the relatively low participation numbers, but when I was growing up, softball was a thing. Every city had a league, and many people played on multiple teams.

When I started my career as a newspaper sports writer in the early 90s, my colleague Scott Kendrick and I were put in charge of The News-Herald's weekly slow-pitch softball coverage. This section took up several pages in the Saturday paper, and I was once told it accounted for hundreds – maybe 1,000 or more – in extra copies of the newspaper sold.

People loved seeing their names and their friends' names in the statistics we would publish. We also printed league standings, a weekly ranking of the top area teams (the "Sweet 16"), and a notes column that Scott and I co-wrote.

We in the newsroom also played the game ourselves. Because we worked weird night shifts, though, we weren't available to play in the regular city leagues, which scheduled most of their games on weekday evenings.

Instead, we played in the Ohio Day Men's League, which as I recall had its games on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. As you might imagine, the teams were made up of guys who did night work...policemen, fire fighters, third-shift factory workers, etc.

And us.

I always looked forward to those weekday morning games, which were relatively early (9:30 and 10:30am) for those of us who had stayed in the newsroom until the first papers came off the press some 8-9 hours earlier. But they were always so much fun that it was worth losing a little sleep.

Anyway, Jess played softball at a very high level for some of the best teams in Northeast Ohio. He was primarily a pitcher and first basemen.

He let me serve as bat boy for a few of those teams, and man, I felt like king of the world walking out onto the field several times a game to retrieve the team's bats and take them back to the dugout.

When you're 8 or 10 years old or whatever I was, getting to sit on the bench with a bunch of great athletes (all of whom were very nice to me) was a real treat.

Like I said, though, softball has waned in popularity over the years. And, now in his early 70s with the battle scars of decades of competition to prove it, Jess isn't playing these days anyway.

But like me, he still has his memories. And I hope they're good ones as he celebrates another trip around the sun today.

Happy birthday, Jess, and thanks for sharing some of those glory days with your little brother-in-law.

Fond memories of youth sports in the 70s and 80s

The photo above is not, it should be noted, one in which I or anyone I know appears. My little league softball/baseball career had just about ended by 1983.

But the one thing I share with the young men in this picture is the experience of having played dozens (maybe hundreds) of games wearing jeans. Not baseball pants, just good old Toughskins from Sears.

And, I should add, we were brilliant.

Or at least we thought we were. I played on some pretty good teams over the years and could hit the ball a fair distance, which is a good thing considering I had such a weak arm for an outfielder.

Here's what I remember about youth sports in the late 70s and early 80s:

• We were always coached by dads, many of whom smoked during practices and games.
• We wore those jeans but did have sweet matching t-shirts and hats.
• If you weren't a good hitter, no one on the other other team had any qualms about yelling out that fact when you came to the plate ("Move in, move in! He can't hit it out of the infield!") I'm not saying this is necessarily good, but it's pretty how much how it was.
• We got ice cream after games, but only if we won.

And I remember having fun. The whole thing really was a lot of fun.

I'm not saying it's radically different now, though I don't see the kids wearing jeans while they're playing. I spent more than a decade coaching and organizing youth soccer, T-ball, and baseball leagues, and the one thing kids of the 2000s shared with us Gen Xers is that they were just out there looking for a good time.

So that was always my philosophy as a dad-coach. Yes, I was going to make you work to get better, and yes, we were going to try to win. But if you're 9 years old and you're not out there having fun, then some adult (in this case me) has failed pretty badly.

You can go on your Old Person Rants about keeping score and participation trophies and all of that, but I'm not too inclined to listen. All I know is it's possible for young athletes to improve while still enjoying themselves. And if you're not doing both, you're not going to get much from the experience.

Of course, I still say sweating your way through a doubleheader in a pair of jeans in 85-degree weather builds character, but maybe that's just me.

Parenting fails that keep me awake at night

I used to consider myself a pretty good parent, but in recent years I've come to realize how often I've failed my children. And it kills me inside. A few examples:

• My 9-year-old son really isn't all that comfortable riding a bike. I taught him to ride a couple of years ago, but we didn't practice much and there aren't sidewalks in our neighborhood and he never got very confident and...seriously, this just tears me up. I'm going to rectify it this summer, but he's 9! Geez, he should be riding all the time, but I think he's still afraid of falling. Big time fail on my part.

• We never got our 14-year-old daughter into softball when she was little and now she wishes she could be playing summer ball with her friends. Which I guess she could, but it would be an awfully big skill gap to overcome. Melanie was so shy when she was little and never seemed all that interested in softball, and her older siblings were only lukewarm about the sport, so...I don't know. Maybe we just didn't want to be bothered with signing her up, taking her to practices and games, etc. I really wish we had gotten her into softball.

• My 16-year-old son wishes he still played hockey and the only reason we made him quit was for our own convenience. Well, in our defense, it would have been awfully tough for him to maintain full hockey and soccer schedules every fall, so we made him make a choice. He chose soccer because that was his established sport, but he was really starting to like hockey. And I love hockey. The problem is, once you stop playing it, your skating skills diminish rapidly, and in hockey if you can't skate you don't rate. We should have sucked it up and let him do both sports.

• My kids are sometimes rude and disrespectful to their mother and I've just let it go too many times. They all do it on occasion, but I notice it especially with one child in particular, who needs to be smacked when he/she does this. I yell at him/her from time to time, but I'm not sure it does much good. I gotta man up on this one.

• My kids don't go to each other's events enough. From an early age we should have made them attend each others' games, concerts, school plays, etc. to show support, but it has always been easier to let them stay home or go to grandma's house or whatever. And now they have no tolerance/desire for going to a sibling's event, which doesn't feel right.

• I do too many things for them instead of making them learn. The right thing to do is to make them stop whatever they're doing and, for instance, come into the mudroom and pick their stuff up off the floor. But it's so much easier for me to do it myself. "Next time I'll make them do it themselves," I say. But I never do. And as a result, they'll never learn to do it if they know Daddy will do it for them. Not good. Back to parenting school for me.

At the old ball game

Getting emotional about baseball is one of the worst cliches of the middle-aged man. Many of us get all blubbery about it for a variety of reasons, the most common of which is that it was the one thing that connected us to our fathers.

That's very true for me, though it wasn't the only thing my dad and I bonded over. We shared a common love for electronic gadgets, stand-up comedy and boxing, among other things. But baseball was pretty high on the list, too.

My dad played years and years of softball, both fast pitch and slow pitch. I was bat boy for a team in the 70s for which my dad was player-manager. Emphasis on "manager" there, as he would only play when absolutely necessary. He also spent years as a softball umpire and fanatical follower of the sport, so he and I spent a lot of time at softball diamonds.

One of the great things about going to softball tournaments with him was the concession stand. He would pretty much buy me whatever I wanted from the concession stand, though fortunately for him I was usually more interested in playing in the dirt or exploring the park.

This, you understand, was back when no one really thought twice about letting an 8- or 9-year-old run off on their own in a public park. You couldn't do that now, and maybe my dad shouldn't have done it then. But he did, and I was fine. And the memories are incredible.

When it comes to baseball, what I really remember about my dad is going to Cleveland Indians games with him. We went to quite a few Indians games back in The Day, and they were almost all bad. Seriously, the Tribe was horrible in those days. Going to a game and seeing them win was a rare and enjoyable treat.

Like a lot of guys (and girls, too, I'm sure), I have especially vivid memories of my first major league game. It was May 1978, and the Indians were playing the Baltimore Orioles. Getting the chance to actually go to old Cleveland Municipal Stadium was exciting, but the undisputed highlight was walking up the tunnel and seeing that field for the first time.

Oh my, was that something. TVs weren't exactly high-definition back then, so I had no idea how green and neatly kept the grass was. And the dirt was so well-manicured. And there was Andre Thornton, my favorite player. HE WAS ACTUALLY STANDING 50 FEET AWAY FROM ME. So were Duane Kuiper, Buddy Bell, Rick Manning and all of the other players on what was, for most everyone else in the world, a mostly forgettable team.

But they were MY team. And baseball at the time was MY game. And I was there with MY dad, who of course bought me a hot dog and a soda. I had such a great time.

You're probably expecting this story to end with an Indians loss, which in the context of my career as a Tribe fan would make perfect sense.  But they actually won. If I remember correctly, Kuiper had a couple of hits and the Indians chased Baltimore starter Dennis Martinez from the game early, like in the third or fourth inning, and we won, 7-5.

Ironically, Martinez would come to Cleveland and pitch for the Indians an amazing 17 years later as a 40-year-old veteran. He was key to the Indians' 1995 World Series run. But that particular night in the spring of 1978, Dennis lost, and there was at least one 8-year-old boy and his father in the stands who couldn't have been happier.

I still love baseball, of course. The Indians still are, and always will be, my favorite team. They haven't won a World Series since 1948, but year after year I put my faith in them, thinking the Law of Averages will serve up a championship at some point in my lifetime (when in fact that makes no mathematical or statistical sense at all...there's no guaranteeing the Indians will EVER win another World Series, in my lifetime or otherwise).

My dad passed away 12 years ago, so it has been a long time since I got the chance to go to a game with him. I miss him. And come to think of it, given how relatively few Indians games we get to these days, I miss baseball, too. Which I suppose is OK. The best games are always the ones with the best memories attached to them anyway.