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down on his neck. He wheels and surprises me with a hug, an act he confirms by yelling, “Hug!” I hold him so tight it makes my own head reel. Soundlessly we turn an arabesque, a father and young son dancing stag. Carrying him off to bed then, a thought occurs, and I lower him in my arms till he’s horizontal. “Lukey’s surfing” I sing as we sluice the room. “My brave little boy is surfing.”
    He puts his arms out to skim the waves and says, “Whee, whee, whee,” all the way in.
Paul Solotaroff has been a journalist for eighteen years, having written for
Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, Vogue,
and
The New York Times Magazine,
among many others. He’s currently a contributing editor at
Rolling Stone
and
Men’s Journal
magazines, and will publish his third book, a memoir called
The Body Shop,
in 2008. He has been a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the National Magazine Award and his work has been anthologized in
The Best American Sportswriting of the Century.

Little League Confidential

BILL GEIST
    t begins early. At Little League games, some fathers have admitted—or mothers have happily testified as hostile witnesses against them—that among the first thoughts they had after learning they were fathers-to-be was a vision of playing catch with their sons in the backyard. And, yes, all right, if need be, with their daughters.
    “Honey, did that sonogram indicate if the kid is a lefty or a righty? I was in the sporting goods store today …”
    The mother of a particularly talented Little League short-stop—a boy I grew to despise as he robotically and errorlessly vacuumed up my son’s ground balls and threw him out at first—told me that her husband used to put a portable radio tuned to Mets games up to her stomach when she was pregnant to imprint an interest in baseball on the yet unborn. It seemed a calculated risk. I mean, the kid could be walking around saying “Less Filling! Tastes Great!” the rest of his life, too.
    “He was kidding,” she said, “I think. He did it a lot.”
    I told her that was really silly, that I’d waited until the moment of birth, bringing a Rawlings catcher’s mitt to the delivery room for use by the obstetrician. Curiously, however, the baby turned out to be a first baseman. Go figure.
    Of one thing most expectant fathers are certain: their kid is going to get a much earlier start on the game than they did, a leg up, a competitive advantage. We fathers were never as good at the game as we wanted to be—let alone as good as we told our children we were.
    Expectant fathers worry that their offspring will inherit their mediocre hand-eye coordination, their short legs, their clumsy feet. What if my son hates baseball and joins the Audio-Visual Club? What if: My son is a girl? It can happen. It happened to me once.
    The first indication of athletic prowess seized upon by fathers is the newborn’s APGAR score, a score from one to ten given immediately after the birth to indicate the child’s overallhealth. If the score is a nine or a ten, fathers immediately start thinking: professional triple-A ball or higher; something in the six or seven range might mean the best kid can do is make the high school team. Any score lower than that, and fathers’ thoughts naturally turn to adoption.
    If the father protests the APGAR score, suing the hospital to upgrade it, he has the makings of a Little League coach!
    I bought Willie one of those little baseball uniforms for newborns, the pinstriped ones with the little caps. He looked just like a little Yankee or perhaps a Cub, except for the large patch of drool on his chest.
    “Did you see that?!” my wife would shriek, indicating I should punish my son for hitting his grandmother with a stick.
    “Yes, I did,” I’d answer. “He showed good hand-eye coordination that time, but I truly believe he’d develop more power through the hitting zone if he’d step toward her and extend those arms.”
    And when she called the office to tell