Coulson had his first T-ball game today. I was a bit skeptical about how this would work with a bunch of 4 and 5 year olds. A few months ago I tried to explain baseball to Couson while we were at a minor league game. The concept of hitting the ball was pretty easy, but then I tried to explain strikes and outs and it got very complicated. Coulson's eyes glazed over and then he just wanted to go back to climbing over the stadium seats (it was a curiously empty stadium, probably because it was in South Carolina on a Sunday -- no beer).
So thankfully the rules for T-ball are a bit simpler than baseball. For each inning, the teams bat through the whole line-up. For each hit, the runners each advance one base (if the ball goes out real far, there is potential to go more, but that didn't happen today). In the field, once a player gets the ball, he holds it up in the air and yells "time." The coach explained the reasoning this way: "One - they can't throw the ball and two - they can't catch it." The game continues for about an hour, or four innings, whichever is less. No strikes, no outs, everyone scores, but no one keeps count. We made it through 3 innings today. It was mostly the coaches directing the kids what to do and where to go, but by the third inning, the kids were catching on a bit.
Enjoy the video Casey made. It's about 8 minutes long, but it's edited, so it's not boring endless taping. There is also some cute commentary by Charlie (examples of the endearing "oh man"). Coulson is number 4.
