Our captains have fallen

Red quit the team the first week in August, the second to last game I was with the team before my exit.

            Not the easiest man to get along with, Red was one of the few convicts I could be a little afraid of. Powerfully built, he could get a strange look in his eye. More than once he had utterly stopped communicating with me. For two years he would accost me while I was coaching the flag football team, during games, and start in on some harangue that I never could grasp the meaning of. And I tried, too, to make sense of the nature of the trouble.

            Red was elected captain by the team for 2011. Johnny had been the captain in 2010, but for reasons unknown, he was rejected. When I heard about it, I was not pleased. Johnny was the guy I would confide in and he could be depended on to tell me the truth.  Now he had been replaced.

            Being captain means little more than handling internal complaints among the players so the coaches are not burdened with them. I don’t think Red saw the job that way; what he wanted to do was to be able to get on the players for making errors in the field and not hitting at the plate.

            This misunderstanding of his role surfaced in June. The Giants lost a couple of games back to back, which always spells trouble, and Red was getting on players in the dugout for their errors. Seeing this, I took Red aside and explained that, at least during a game, we do not get on players for either physical or mental mistakes–it is a coaching thing and to be worked out in a practice. Red disagreed, strongly, and the conversation ended dismally. However, Red did stop the confrontations with the players, but only for a while.

            Not sure how old Red is, early forties at least, but his skills are declining. For years he had the number four hole in the line-up. Clean-up is what we like to designate it, and there is pressure to perform. Red’s performance began to slip until it disappeared. This was when I worked with him on his hitting and it improved to some degree. That last only a few games then he fell back into the old way of swinging, the softball swing, and it was painful for everyone. There was no choice, and Kevin, our great co-manager and long time friend, and I agreed–Red had to be moved to a lower hole in the batting order. I can see the look on his face right now when he came into the dugout to look at the line-up card as though he knew what he would find. Yep, batting seventh. He never said a word and proceeded to go hitless in three at bats with one strike out.

            Next game it started again; he was getting into player’s faces if they made an error. It sounded mean and degrading so I had to ask him to step outside the dugout for a little chat. This was not an exciting time for me. He would not listen but insisted as captain he had the right to rebuke and reprove team players. He walked away from me in mid stream.

            The next game we played a tough team and were behind from the first inning. Red was at first base, hitting sixth now because Kevin and I wanted to give him something, and he was playing badly, two errors in the field, two strike outs looking, but worse, dogging it, and Kevin would have none of it.

            This was a game I was running and I was at the third base coaching box. After an inning’s third out, the team broke from the dugout toward their defensive positions, except Red. He sauntered out to first, and late, with no baseball in his glove for warming the infielders up, and Kevin yelled out to him to hustle it up. Soon as he heard it, Red stopped, turned, threw his glove toward the dugout, tore off his cap, jerked off his shirt right about when he got alongside the pitcher’s mound, and that was it. He quit.

            Kevin approached him and the two got in a terrific argument, which drew the attention of a lower yard officer. If a fist fight were to break out, or even some shoving, the whole program might suffer. I entered the dugout and tried to quiet the men, and failing that I told them that a cop was approaching. That at least cooled things down, but Red was gone.

            What a shock, but it was not over. The trouble spilled over to the rest of the guys and a heated argument erupted between Johnny and Kevin. By that time I was out at third base again and did not know what was taking place. At the end of the inning there was no Johnny in the dugout–he had quit the team, too.

            I was crushed; I felt empty. My confidant on the team, gone. The captain, gone. We got beat and badly on top of it. Team chemistry, gone now, and where do we go from here.