My old baseball glove is still in the garage. The leather has softened and darkened with age, and the pocket still carries the faint shape of a thousand throws. I bought it because my nine-year-old son, Jake, needed someone on the other end of the ball. Looking back, the time we spent together mattered far more than anything we learned about baseball.
I’ve written plenty about baseball in my own childhood—about dusty diamonds, scuffed cleats, and summer evenings that felt as if they might last forever. But this story isn’t about me playing baseball. It belongs to the years when Jake played Little League, when I found myself quietly stepping back onto the field, and when a simple game gave a father and son a language of their own.
Jake was probably nine years old when we heard the news. It was winter in Story City, Iowa, and someone mentioned that Little League was coming to town. Story City wasn’t exactly a baseball hotbed, so the idea carried some weight. It felt like an opportunity—not just for Jake, but for us.
Up until then, Jake hadn’t grown up tossing a ball around the yard or playing catch in the driveway the way I had. He didn’t have older brothers nearby to teach him the game. His cousins lived in another state. Baseball hadn’t yet found its way into his hands—or into his confidence. With Little League waiting on the horizon, it felt like time to change that.
We started small. Very small. Three or four feet apart. Underhand tosses. Soft throws that barely left my hand. The goal wasn’t distance or speed; it was comfort. Catch the ball. Feel it settle into your hands. Learn that it didn’t have to hurt. Learn that you could trust the glove—and, in a way, trust the person on the other end of the throw.
Then we would take a step back. And another. And another.
The distance between us grew a few feet at a time, but the connection grew with it. Each session built just enough confidence to stretch things a little farther. The throws became firmer. The catches became cleaner. The fear slowly disappeared, replaced by a quiet pride I could see gathering in Jake’s face. Every ball he caught seemed to say, I can do this. Every ball he threw back seemed to say, Let’s do it again.
Of course, no baseball story truly begins until the glove enters the picture. There is something sacred about a kid’s first baseball glove—the smell of new leather, the stiffness of the pocket, the way it feels far too big and far too new all at once. We bought Jake his glove, and I knew immediately that I would need one too. If we were going to do this right, we were going to do it together. So I bought a glove for myself.
And just like that, baseball became part of our spring and summer rhythm. We played catch in the yard and threw in the park. Evening light stretched across the grass while we worked through drills that never felt much like drills. The ball moved back and forth with a steady, reassuring pop—his glove, then mine, then his again. Some fathers and sons talk best across a kitchen table. For a while, Jake and I talked through a baseball.
There is a scene near the end of Field of Dreams when Ray Kinsella finally understands that the young ballplayer on his field is his father. The grand mystery of the whole story narrows to one simple question: “Hey, Dad—want to have a catch?” The first time I saw it, I understood the ache in that moment. Years later, standing across the yard from Jake, I understood something else: sometimes you don’t recognize the importance of a catch while you are having it. You only know that the ball leaves your hand and your son is there to receive it—and that he sends it back.
Jake took to the game quickly. It made sense to him. His coordination sharpened, his confidence grew, and before long he wasn’t merely keeping up—he was good. The awkward movements of a beginner gave way to smooth swings, quick reactions, and the easy rhythm of a boy who had begun to feel at home on the diamond. And he was fast—the kind of fast that sent little clouds of dust rising behind his cleats as he rounded the bases, his arms pumping and a determined smile spreading across his face.
The games were fun, of course. I coached my share of teams. I stood along baselines and inside dugouts, offering encouragement, instruction, and the occasional calm reminder to breathe. We voted on whether the kids should pitch in the games. I voted for a pitching machine. At nine years old, most of them didn’t yet have the strength or coordination to be consistent from the mound, so four-pitch walks were often more common than balls in play.
But if I’m honest, the games were never the heart of it for me. The heart of it was standing on a makeshift mound, ball in hand, with Jake waiting at the plate. I had been a pitcher growing up—Little League, Pony League, all of it. I had good hand-eye coordination. I knew how to throw. Now, years later, I was drawing on those same instincts not to win a game, but to build something in my son.
Pitch after pitch, I watched him learn not to bail out when the ball came in. I watched him stand his ground. Swing. Miss. Adjust. Connect. Between pitches, I would offer a word or two—keep your head in, watch the ball, trust your hands—but mostly I tried to give him something steady to face. A father can’t remove every fastball life will throw at his son. He can, however, help him learn to stay in the box.
That moment when a kid stops flinching and starts trusting himself is a quiet miracle. You cannot rush it. You can only create the space for it to happen, then keep showing up with another pitch. Jake became a very good hitter, and he grew fearless at the plate. One memory remains especially vivid.
There was a pitcher from nearby Gilbert whose name has been lost to time, but the sound of his fastball has not. The ball whizzed across the plate and struck the catcher’s mitt with a sharp, unmistakable pop—the kind of sound that makes a dugout go still. Someone said he was throwing close to seventy miles per hour, which in Little League felt like ninety-two in the majors. One by one, our hitters stepped into the batter’s box, but no one dug in too deeply. There was respect in their posture, and more than a little fear.
In three trips to the plate, Jake stood his ground. He stayed calm and waited. He didn’t try to overpower the pitcher; he simply timed him and put smooth swings on the ball. Two solid hits. Two balls driven deep into the gaps. I think both became doubles. He barely looked as if he were swinging hard at all.
I remember watching him round first base, his legs churning and his confidence out ahead of him. I was proud of the hits, but that wasn’t the deepest part of the feeling. What moved me was that he had stayed in there. The little boy who once stood three feet away while I underhanded a ball to him was now facing the hardest thrower around without backing away. A father gets only a few moments when growth becomes visible right in front of him. That was one of mine.
We did plenty of fielding too—grounders hit just hard enough to challenge him and pop-ups drifting lazily against the wide Iowa sky. At times it felt cinematic, like a scene from The Sandlot. I half expected to tell him simply to hold his glove up while I dropped the ball into it. I was Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez to Jake’s Scotty Smalls. A couple of times, it nearly worked that way.
Those afternoons stretched on, filled with laughter, repetition, and the satisfying tiredness that comes from being fully present. I was in good shape then—strong and quick. I loved chasing fly balls, snagging them at full extension, and showing the kids, and maybe myself, that I still had it. Jake would grin when I made a good play, and for a moment I was not just Dad giving instructions. I was his teammate.
I loved warming up with the team in the outfield. I loved pitching to the kids. I loved the simple joy of movement and the old muscle memory returning. But most of all, I loved what the game opened between Jake and me. Baseball brought back pieces of my own childhood, yet it never felt as though I were trying to turn him into a younger version of me. His game was his own. I was simply walking beside him as he discovered it.
The game itself had changed since my childhood. Jake was not a nine-year-old playing with fourteen-year-olds on a ragtag team of ruffians. By the early 1990s, baseball had evolved into fancy uniforms, helicopter parents, scheduled treats, and carefully organized practices. But beneath all that, the old game was still there: a ball, a glove, a patch of grass, and someone willing to stand across from you.
There is a special kind of magic in that.
You don’t recognize it in the moment. At the time, it just feels like summer. Like practice. Like one more evening when the sun dips low, the grass smells sweet and familiar, and somebody’s mother is calling that it is time to come inside. But years later, those moments rise with surprising clarity: the sound of the ball settling into leather, the rhythm of a swing, the look on Jake’s face when something finally clicked. Those were gifts disguised as ordinary evenings.
Little League came and went, as seasons do. Jake continued playing baseball after we moved to Ham Lake, Minnesota, and he grew older. Eventually his interests shifted toward weight training, CrossFit, and Olympic lifting. Life moved forward, and the gloves spent more time on a shelf.
Every August, I find myself watching the Little League World Series on television. As the players step to the plate and race around the bases, my mind drifts back to my own years in the game and then to Jake’s. I remember what it felt like to be the boy on the field, and later, the father watching from the dugout or along the baseline. The details have changed with time, but the excitement, nerves, and simple pleasure of playing baseball remain familiar. For a few weeks each summer, those memories feel close again.
But that chapter—those years in Story City, Iowa, when baseball stitched us together—remains one of the quiet highlights of my life. Baseball was never really about baseball. It was about time. It was about trust. It was about building confidence one throw at a time and creating memories neither of us realized we were making.
In Field of Dreams, the catch between Ray and his father feels like a chance to recover time that had been lost. Jake and I were luckier. We were having our catch while the time was still ours, though I did not fully understand it then. I thought I was teaching him how to field a ground ball, stay in the batter’s box, and trust his swing. All along, he was teaching me what fatherhood so often asks of us: be present, be patient, and keep throwing the ball back.
The ball stopped traveling between us years ago, but the catch never really ended.
