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ain’t the goddamned World Series, it’s Little League. Our right-fielder picks his butt all game, and he gets that rule. Why don’t you?”
    My dad’s flare-up quieted the parents for the time being, but behind the scenes, I would hear rumblings from my teammates.
    At fielding practice a week or so later, a kid named Marcus tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and he said, “My dad says your dad is an asshole.”
    I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I just stood there for a few moments. Finally, I responded, “No, he’s not. Your dad’s wrong.”
    Then a baseball hit me on my shin, and I turned and realized it had been my turn in the ground ball line, and my dad had just hit one at me because I wasn’t paying attention.
    “Pay attention, son! Don’t stand there with your thumb up your ass.”
    My dad was not helping my case for him.
    Each practice, the parents and the spoiled kids would get to him a little more. He wanted this experience to just be about teaching baseball, but it wasn’t. It was more of an unwelcome exercise in tolerance and self-restraint.
    Finally, the friction came to a head during a practice in May. The temperature was hot that day, and the kids decided they didn’t feel like doing my dad’s conditioning drills, which he had learned during his time in the navy. After a series of foul-pole-to-foul-pole sprints, one of them staged a revolt and refused to follow his orders.
    “This is dumb. Baseball isn’t about running. Any real coach would know that,” my teammate shouted, standing defiantly in front of my dad.
    The instant the sound of that kid’s insubordinate voice hit our fearless leader’s ears, my dad had the same reaction Bruce Willis has at the end of The Sixth Sense when he realizes he’s been dead the whole time: complete shock and confusion, followed by deep breaths in an attempt to calm himself. My dad’s efforts to remain cool were futile.
    The argument spiraled out of control, ending with him screaming, “Coach your own goddamned team, then, and kiss my ass,” to a group of fourteen kids and one terrified assistant coach named Randy, who was only coaching the team because his wife had left him and he wanted something to take his mind off of his misery. Randy wasn’t the most emotionally stable human being at the moment.
    “It’s all yours, Randy! Have a blast!”
    My dad stormed off to his car and took off. Unfortunately, in his anger, he had forgotten that he was my ride. We were three miles away from home, and at that moment, I wasn’t about to ask anyone else’s parents for a ride—the kids were all staring at me, and Randy looked like he was about to start crying—so I decided I’d just walk home.
    An hour later, when I was about two blocks away from my house, my dad drove up alongside me and rolled down his window. “Shit. I forgot to pick you up, didn’t I?” I nodded yes. “Sorry about that. Also, I’m not coaching that fucking team anymore.”
    After he removed himself from the head coach position, my dad still came to all of my games and followed the team closely. He and I would have our own practices on days when the team didn’t practice.
    “Randy doesn’t know shit about the game. He throws a baseball like he’s a woman playing darts.”
    So two days a week, we’d practice pitching, just him and me. Then one day as we were driving to the field for one of our practices, he took a different route.
    “Where are we going? The field’s the other way,” I said.
    “We’re picking up Roger. He’s gonna play with us,” he said.
    Roger was the weirdest kid on the team by far. He smelled horrible, like rotten fruit mixed with Old Spice. He was actually a pretty good pitcher, but he’d have mental breakdowns in the middle of innings and completely implode.
    “Why are we picking up Roger?” I asked.
    “I’m teaching you pitching. He’s the other pitcher on the team. Figured I’d teach you both at the same time,” he said.
    We stopped