Nu-Flex Vs. Valley Potato

I have one trophy earned for achievement. For some reason, out of all of my accomplishments and good work I have done throughout my life, I have only acquired one actual, little-person-on-top-of-a-personally-engraved-name-plate trophy. It stands 5 inches tall, has a faux marble base, and on top stands a silver, painted, plastic figurine poised to hit a tiny baseball that will never be thrown. I cherish this little trophy. This is the story of how I got it.

I was nearing the end of my fifth grade year in elementary school and my eleventh on Earth in the small farming town of Kittitas, Washington. Kittitas was a settlement of about seven-hundred people, about 6 miles East of Ellensburg near the center of the great state of Washington. If you have ever driven by this sleepy little hamlet, nestled in the cradle of the Kittitas Valley, you may be familiar with the now-painted-over “Kittitas Bong Squad” message that had been spray painted on numerous structures in the area—the Squad being the unofficial ambassadors of the town for many years. Some considered them a secret society, or the town’s version of the Freemasons.

My childhood was about as magical as a childhood gets, with me having the run of the town on my bicycle and a community of fine folks with fine families of friendly farmers. Other than my asthma, brought on by my allergy to the valley’s main crop of Timothy Hay, I would describe growing up in such a town as ideal. It had safety, a solid school system and little league baseball.

Our town was just big enough to support two little league teams out of the ten in the valley at that particular time. Some of the games were played in Ellensburg and some on our home turf of Kittitas. All of the teams were named after local businesses and the two from Kittitas were no exception. There was the developed team of heavy hitting farm boys on the team of Valley Potato and the scrappy team of misfits from town on the Nu-Flex team. Of course I was on the Nu-Flex team.

Mr. Varnum was our coach. He was the father of Tyler Varnum who was a consistently good left-handed pitcher and utility player on our team. Mr. Varnum was a dedicated little league dad and a good coach. Often arriving straight from work, Coach Varnum was always ready to pitch batting practice, hit fly balls and grounders to us with an old mitt and well-worn cowboy boots. He rewarded us for good play and called us on our crap, but he was there to teach us baseball through the hungry hours of the late spring afternoons.

My friends, Dave, Danny, Joe, Pierre, Kirk, Alex and others were on the team with me. None of us were the best at baseball, but Mr. Varnum had put us in positions that he felt confident we could pull off with our strengths. At eleven, it’s hard for a person to see the importance of teamwork, but as we played we were discovering the advantages of thinking as one unit and not as nine selfish little brats wanting to make the big play.

We became the battle worn Cinderella team, wind-burned and hardened by the cold, gusty, relentless wind of Palmiero Park. We used our focused bitterness to manufacture runs as a well-oiled little league machine that year. What Nu-Flex lacked in power, we made up for with cunning determination. We collected daring stolen bases, exploited attention spans and leveraged our speed in the base paths. We cheered each other on, took calculated risks and earned every win.

We had rough games. There was one evening where Tyler had thrown too many pitches and just needed off the mound. We tried four other pitchers that game, and while Pierre began to warm up for the first time pitching in his life, Mr. Varnum pointed directly at me during the game and said, “You’re next.”

I had never pitched, but I was sure ready to try. I also wasn’t. We were in a situation where we had walked in about three runners and each kid’s trial-by-fire was turning into a shaky shooting gallery for the blind, with only about twenty percent of the new pitcher’s throws finding their way into the large, fluctuating, little league strike-zone.

Would I fare any better? Could I push past the butterflies in my stomach and make my parents proud of an undiscovered talent? Would this be my moment?

No. It turned out that it was Pierre’s moment. I stayed planted in left field waiting for the right-handed batters to pull an early swung hit up and into my outstretched glove. Pierre however, proved to be a natural pitcher. He struck out the next three batters 1-2-3 with his unorthodox, physical-therapist-frowned-upon sidearm release. It was pretty amazing to behold, and we ended up rallying to take the win from Frazzini’s Pizza, and we coasted into second place for the end of season jamboree, right behind our rivals, Valley Potato.

For those of you unfamiliar with youth sports, a jamboree is an event where teams play multiple games against each other through the course of one or two days. They happen because the organizers get halfway through the season’s schedule and realize that if all the teams were to play each other weekly, the season would last into the better part of the following season. They cram the remaining games into the next least convenient weekend with a nearly impossible timetable of scheduled matches or games.

So you see, the term “jamboree” becomes its own antonym. Noisy celebration ≠ jamboree. Jamboree actually translates to something along the lines of: Your Memorial Day Weekend will be spent rising early, rushing from field to field while tired and cranky, eating poorly, sitting on grassy-melting popsicles and hoping the Porta-potty you just used didn’t contain a flesh eating virus. That’s a jamboree.

Now it was June, and the Spring wind had all but disappeared into the beautiful splendor of rejuvenating Eastern Washington sunshine. The first hay cutting wouldn’t be down for at least another week, thus giving me the furlough I needed from allergy related asthma between mildew and pollen seasons. The games on that Saturday would determine who came out on top of the Kittitas Valley Little League heap.

As all of the kids on the Nu-Flex team came together around Coach Varnum, we realized that we were a glove down. There were only eight of us and we needed nine. The end of the school year the week before launched many family vacations and robbed us of several key players.

What was worse, was that Pierre announced that he could play the first game but would have to leave after that for HIS family vacation. Our once rock solid team was falling apart both literally and figuratively. We were losing our people AND there was resentment that our best pitcher was choosing to leave before the season was over. Many of us allowed the jealousy of Pierre’s gifts to overtake us now. That we had all benefitted from his pitching was now overshadowed by the fact that not only was he our best pitcher, but he had also cornered the market on breakdancing talent at our elementary school. Why had God given Pierre two helpings of kid-valued talent and the rest of us only half a scoop?

Coach Varnum was a little freaked out. There was talk of suiting up one of the player’s kid brothers to pass them off as someone that they weren’t, but that was just a desperate idea. Then there was the chance of roping an eligible player off of a team that had already been knocked out. That was better, but if they were knocked out early, wouldn’t that imply the replacement player might stink? It was the last day of the season. If we could stretch a jersey over an eligible CPR dummy and get away with it, we would do it.

We picked up a player from another team, pulled a jersey over him and stuck him in right field. His name was Gene and he did not disappoint us. We couldn’t offer him a Nu-Flex hat, those were long since spoken for, but if we won, he would certainly get a pro-rated portion of our glory.

Pierre pitched us through our first game against Ranch and Home (honestly, I don’t remember the team, but this might have been one of them). Before the “W” was even dry in the scorebook, he was in the backseat of his parent’s AMC Eagle, headed out of the parking lot.

Next up was our closest approximation of a crosstown rival—well rested, fully manned, fed and ready, Valley-Freaking-Potato. Their gold and brown uniforms the psychological opposite of the Nu-Flex red, white and blue. Our stirrup socks sagged around our ankles as we took the field against our enemy, the juggernaut called Valley Potato.

You may chuckle at the name, but many dominating teams have had terrible monikers. Take the Lakers. What is a Laker? Packers? Yankees?

The first innings were rough. Our bats were quiet and we lost a few runs. I had been moved to second base and the other stand-in player (this time it was yet another knocked out player) had been planted in left field.

The turning point came when I took three ground balls in a row that I tossed to my best friend Dave at first base. That excitement gave us the hope that we could run the defense necessary to hold our enemy fast at the line. Our bats came alive and we won the game. Meaning we were officially one win ahead of them, but due to the crazy mess of a scheduling bracket that had been setup around the jamboree, we had to play Valley Potato again, but on a different field a half mile walk away at the high school.

Valley Potato had rallied and pulled out the next win, forcing us to walk back to Palmiero Park and face… Valley Potato. Coach Varnum told us that if we won this game, we would be the champs, but if we lost, we would be tied with Valley Potato and need to play them one more time for the championship. It was our third game and their second. That afternoon, there was baseball and nothing else. I had never been this close to first place…ever.

The breeze kicked up at Palmiero Park. The hot, early afternoon sun had acted together with our hastily eaten lunches to cause fatigue in our already tired bodies. If we could win one more game, we would take the title.

We were in the final inning of the game and Nu-Flex was up by one run. There were two outs with runners on first and second. I was playing second base tight, ready for the pickoff of the tall player from Valley Potato who shall remain nameless. When the ball was hit, I was in motion towards the inside short stop position and dove for the ball, catching it off the first bounce into my bare hand. Landing on my chest from the leaping catch, I kicked up a cloud of dust and ash from the eruption of Mt. St. Helens six years earlier. One more out…we only needed one more out and the championship would be ours and I could go home and have a couple well-earned Otter pops.

The lead base runner was on the move and about to cross my path. I only needed to tag him. As I reached out to his passing legs with the baseball that I held as tightly as I could, I felt it knock against his ankle and foot hard. There was no doubt about it. I had tagged him out and that meant the game would be over. Another runner passed me by rounding third as I looked for the umpire for the decision on the play.

The runner didn’t stop after I tagged him, forfeiting any and all honor and respect he had gained from me that day. He had simply continued around the bases as if nothing had happened. This made the umpire assume he had not been tagged out. With the cloud of dust, and the illusion of an evaded tag, the umpire’s final word came down hard upon my head. SAFE!

We had lost two runs and the lead. My protests fell on the umpire’s deaf ears. I tried to appeal to the boy I had tagged out, and he wouldn’t fess up. I watched him laughing about it with his teammates as I began to lose my mind. I was visibly upset. I made a scene. Emotions ran high as I cried out for justice. After my tirade, play resumed and we ended the game with a loss. But the magic of baseball, of LIFE, had been eradicated from my present and near future sense of being.

When everything hinged on the judgment of a man whose biggest claim to fame at the time was that he once won $1,000 on a lottery scratch ticket, well, then maybe life wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be.

Everyone was tired on the half mile walk back to the high school and my father and mother walked beside me, knowing how upset I had been and seeing the whole ugly scene play out. My mom gave me a hug and told me she knew I had done it, and that in her mind I was a champ. My dad explained to me that the umpire had realized his mistake after he had made the call and explained why he couldn’t go back on it. Dad also told me that the reason I got so upset wasn’t that the game was lost, or that the wrong call was made. I had gotten upset that I had told the truth and I wasn’t believed. I had been given a dose of injustice and that I needed to remember how that felt. Mom and dad used this as a valuable, teachable moment.

They say you grow up when you begin to swap innocence for experience. That one single play tipped the scale decidedly onto the experience side. Lesson learned, the right decision isn’t always arrived upon and when it comes down to it, your truth doesn’t mean Jack squat to an umpire on his sixth game of the day who was possibly nursing a hangover. Also, other kids don’t always play fair and are little bastards.

The next game was for all the marbles. Literally, I mean every player, parent and family member had had enough of that year’s little league season and were losing their marbles. The winners would be heroes, if for anything just vanquishing the final innings of the season.

The final game didn’t have nearly the same type of emotional drama that the game before it did. The kids on Valley Potato were starting to look as sad as we did. Call it Karma, or a weak baseball curse, but the powerhouse of Valley Potato was silenced that game and at the final inning, Nu-Flex held them down and scored the runs necessary to win. I had become a champion.

I remember us rushing off the field to our coach, who looked like he had just been reunited with his family after four years in a jungle prison camp. He looked deliriously tired and was positively goofy as he explained to us again and again that we were number one. He lost control like many coaches do in the first seconds of championship fever. He said he would spring for pizza. We all went and had some, even Gene and what’s-his-name that suited up to fill out the roster were invited.
The team was presented with a big trophy, but each of us got our own tiny first place trophy that was ours. Sure it’s small and my only one, but I will never, ever forget my first taste of bitter injustice and as it happens, the day I knew what it felt like to be a champion. It was the day that Nu-Flex beat Valley Potato, and that’s the Damm truth.