I spent this afternoon with a two year old. Cute kid. At first he didn’t know what to make of this tall foreigner but all little kids love to play. First his parents took one each of his arms and did the “Jump and pulled him off the ground” game. Then I played the “Jump and lift the little guy to ride on my shoulders” game. He was probably scared so I let him down to his mother’s arms. Once his mother put him down he put up his index finger. Yes, the international signal for “One more time”. I don’t know what they are feeding the kid but he is solidly built. He is not one of your econo-two-year olds. He is built like a 57 Chevy. As you could imagine “one more time” is never one more time. Good work out.
Later I played a game of hiding behind furniture and having him find me. I even had to sneak out the back door to outsmart the guy. It is great to hear a little one laugh. Us tall guy don’t hide that well.
Then I thought I would try to teach the tyke how to catch. At that age you have to throw it just right and hope the ball doesn’t bounce out. Luckily the mom was there to teach and aid in the cupping action. I had a Nerf-like that worked the best. He was able to catch the thing all by himself. This means my expert coaching did the impossible again. Just so you know that when this guy makes millions playing Major League Baseball it was that first Dime that started the process. I will be humble another day.
I wish I had the parents permission to post a picture for I have a great shot that my wife took of the smiling mother and the boy catching. Priceless.
UPDATE: I put in a cropped picture.




I am waiting for that humble day, Centime.
Good work on the catching part. I expect by age four you will have him with a 50 mph fastball.
No need to wait, Dev. Anytime you want humble I will give it to you gladly. BTW, 80 kph.
BASEBALL, sport! In American metrics!
Right, there’s no crying in baseball and no metic system either, thank the gods (and Abner Doubleday).
Don’t try to convince me that the number 10 is not the best way to measure things.
Actually a ruler or tape measure is. The number 10 doesn’t “measure” anything.
Yes, I am immeasurable. Thank you. Why are you being so effusive with the praise?
BTW, ?are you implying you will make me humble.
Never happen, GI! I’m a Marine. We’re never humble.
“It’s hard to be humble when you’re the finest.”
“It’s hard to be humble when you’re the finest.”
Dev, thanks for understanding and the compliment. My sock is blushing.
“Later I played a game of hiding behind furniture and having him find me…Us tall guy don’t hide that well.”
Yeah, I can imagine this would be a challenge, especially with your furniture scattered about in unassembled piles while you vainly struggle to decipher the Icelandic pictograms in the IKEA instruction manual.
Would you help me out? I have a digital watch so what is this clockwise thing they talk about?
They are not in unassembled piles. They are in pre-assembled staging areas.
**
So cute! You would think an enormous talking sock would scare a 2 year old. And terrify his mother.
Funny, the mother was terrified of me when I married her aunt. She has got used to me now.
Uummmm, how does a sock play catch?
The Sockratic Method. (I am not stealing Pencil’s joke and not giving her credit. I am giving it back through Brent and hoping for colateral damage.)
Brent, I wondered if HRT has access to one of those separate-toed socks that might make toes prehensile again…Seriously, this sounds like great fun!
Nanda, if I bought one of those I bet it would fit me like a glove.
More like a hood.
Aww…
Took my 8 year old nephew to a Yankee game when he was visiting us in the city and truly enjoyed indoctrinating him because he lives in LA. (He thought he was a Dodger fan.)
We had two seats behind the dug-out so we got to see Jeter flex during the 7th inning stretch for a thrill of a lifetime! I was an embarrassing adult, because I elbowed my way to the front to get the autograph.
It just couldn’t be helped and I make no apology.
Who do I make the autograph to, Liz? (These fans can be so pushy.)
“He is built like a 57 Chevy.”
Might not be a compliment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g
Why is the video of a ’59?
God help Tom Brady if I ever see him after a game!
I’m an unabashed fan of Wolverines.
Liz, most of the Hanshin Tigers fans are abashed by mid-season.
I think they have a cure for TB now.
Ok, Mr. Big Stuff! I carry Nippon League in my stores and the Tigers do particularly well because of their excellent logo. Nobody knows their record but they love the jersey:
Hanshin Tigers Japan Baseball Happi Coat Hanten Matsuri Kimono Yukata White New
What about these?
http://balldiamondball.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/IMG_3633.png
That’s the logo! It’s excellent and the American public reacts so positively to it.
Well done, Centime.
Let’s get this baseball party started!
npb.jp/eng/
Liz, is BDB ready for the Carping that will ensue?
Let’s hope so! STD, our Nippon best sellers are:
Hanshin Tigers
Yomiuri Giants
*Hiroshima Carp
Yokohama Whales
What does STD mean? Standard?
Retail slang: Season To Date :)
In most of the nation it stands for Sexually Transmitted Disease.
Might be similar.
Dev, is that retail or wholesale?
Maybe in your world; in mine, it is a purely financial analysis.
Thanks, Liz.
Is that in the fashion industry? How is season defined?
4- just like the year. Jan-March, April-June, July-Sept, Oct- Dec!
http://npb.jp/eng/
I know which team Vald and Dev would be on. The Ham Fighters of course.
The next Sadaharu Oh, perhaps?
Isn’t he retired now? This thread has made me think about the huge cultural impacts upon sports. It’s interesting. Par exemple:
NBA- too obvious to mention
MLB- very mixed ethnicities but unusually represented by Hispanic players in the U.S. and highly popular in Japan
NHL- Canadian, Canadian, and Canadian with a splash of Russian
NFL- mixed ethnicities but there are 12 Samoan pros from a country with a population of 195,000 people!
Golf and tennis are obviously not as diversified; Vijah Singh, the true UN ambassador Tiger Woods, and the Williams sisters are all outliers.
I think this would be an interesting topic for a book.
Yep, Sadaharu Oh is now fully retired. In addition to all his awards and championships as a player for the Yomiuri Giants, he also won two Japan Series titles as manager of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks and was the manager of the Japanese national team that won the World Baseball Classic in 2006.
I’m starting on my book now … :)
What makes baseball such an attractive sport in Japan?
I don’t understand completely the attraction of baseball. Part of this is because I was never very good at it. For me baseball is slow because the action stops and starts. A good baseball fan plays the game in their heads and thinks about what will happen next. They know the history, the stats, and the rules.
I don’t know if Japan which is into group thinking ever produced a team sport. They had to import it.
During the war they played baseball but had to play in Japanese. They had to come up with homegrown terms for base, ball, strike, and foul.
Baseball was never my favored sport until the 1990s and I attended a Yankee game in which David “Boomer” Wells was pitching. I had grown a tad impatient with the endless back and forth between pitcher and batter… the balls, the strikes, the pop-ups, the digging at the mound, and the endless repositioning of helmets along with discussions between catcher and pitcher, etc.
One game I attended in the Bronx changed my attitude towards the game forever. Wells was pitching and even I noticed this was a huge mental and psychological battle between batter and pitcher. I can’t quite explain it but those of you who know of what I speak understand this. (Drysdale/Mantle was a classic example.)
I was fascinated and never grew impatient again at the sometimes tedious pace. I also read “Moneyball” by my fav author Michael Lewis and he explained that ‘on base’ percentage was the most important stat a batter could have; it wasn’t necessarily the hits or the home runs that mattered, but sometimes merely the walks.
I of course prefer football because of the open action, but even that sport isn’t for dummies who don’t understand how to read the field and the body language of both the offensive and defensive linemen.
All sports are hard to understand, hard to execute, and those NFL playbooks make calculus look like arithmetic!
My next sport to master is hockey because it moves at such a fast pace. (Of course, the colorful fans sitting in the arenas are distraction enough for anyone.) Whenever I have attended a game at the Joe, I find myself with zero time to kibitz with my hockey pals because one could easily miss a major play in 2-3 seconds!
Liz, what do you think of soccer?
Three things:
1. Most handsome men on the planet.
2. Most athletic men on the planet.
3. Most boring sport on the planet.
:)
Nice post, Dime. Two year olds are amazing. They have such energy and their emotions are all out there to see. They have no filters.
They see everything.
What I find amazing is their concentration powers. They can focus on one thing totally. They also have not learned they can’t do things yet. Oh, and they have such beautiful innocent laughs.
I feel slightly guilty because there has been no discussion of women’s sports. I have always enjoyed NCAA basketball, particularly at Tennessee, UConn, and Stanford. My favorite play evah must have been at Stanford 10 years ago when a 5’3″ freshman made a 3-pt shot and won against the late, great Pat Summitt.
I was also a fan of Hall of Famer Cheryl Mills (Reggie’s sister) and I miss her commentating skills at TNT. She knew exactly what she was talking about and at 6 ft. 2 in. could look any player (male or female) in the eye. :)