Another article was published making baseball dads look like buffoons.
On May 27, 2021, Esquire published an article entitled “Inside Youth Baseball’s Most Notorious Dad-On-Dad Rivalry” that delves into a sordid spat between two baseball dads that occurred over a decade ago in Long Island. The article, written by David Gauvey Herbert, features sordid Joey Buttafuoco-esque shenanigans and really has very little to do with baseball. Yet, Esquire likely wouldn’t have run the piece without the misleading youth baseball hook, showing once again that the “crazy sports parent” has become a lazy trope.
The Unflattering Baseball Dads in the Esquire Article
The Esquire article features two loopy dads with criminal records (fraud) who start a Hatfield McCoy-style feud when their kids are both vying to be the top star on an elite club baseball team. One kid is eventually kicked off the team, because of his dad’s aggressive behavior, and that dad goes and forms his own rival club team.
The two teams play a couple times. The dads almost come to blows after one game, as seen in the YouTube clip below.
One dad then starts receiving threatening text messages, some threatening the well being of his son. The other dad is fingered as the culprit, and the Suffolk County police pick him up, sadly nixing his chances of becoming a reality TV star (a production company had been considering a show featuring his son’s club team).
Next, the author personally visits with both dads years after the events of the story. One dad is now living in some southern town, the name of which he refuses to reveal, as if the guy’s in the Witness Protection Program. The other dad is still in Long Island and saddled with financial troubles.
The article concludes with an observation so corny that it would have been edited out of Field of Dreams:
[The two Long Island baseball dads now] wait for what we all wait for: to suddenly be standing in the batter’s box ourselves. We’re ten years old and knobby kneed, behind in the count, when the man we will become stands up in his seat, cups his hands, and shouts that he loves us.
Inside Youth Baseball’s Most Notorious Dad-On-Dad Rivalry (Esquire, May 27, 2021)
What the Esquire Article Gets Wrong About Baseball Dads
As I slogged through this gratuitously long article, I kept asking myself: what does this have to do with youth baseball? Baseball felt like the incidental Westworldy backdrop to a story about two outlandish and not particularly interesting ex-cons. This piece depicts youth baseball culture about as accurately as the Borat movies document life in Kazakhstan.
With that said, it’s true baseball dads take the sport too seriously, spend way too much money on it, and can be too hard on our kids for not living up to our lofty expectations. Yet, the bigger picture is that we’re spending a big chunk of our non-working hours intimately involved with our kids. We are the opposite of absentee fathers.
The article tries to make the claim that our own childhood baggage is what’s fueling the obsession with youth sports, but I’d posit it has more to do with middle-aged boredom and restlessness. When you’re mostly settled in personal relationships and careers, you frankly have a lot of emotional and psychic energy to burn. The pairing of this energy with the pursuits of our children is both natural and (mostly) beneficial to all involved, even if it can occasionally lead to some flare-ups in Long Island.
For more information about the emotional side of baseball, see:
- How to Manage Your Kid’s Baseball Tantrums and Meltdowns
- Anger Management and Youth Baseball: How to Calm Down
- How to Stop Being a Crazy Baseball Dad
- 5 Ways Youth Baseball Teams Cheat, and How to Respond
- How to Be a Good Baseball Dad in the Backyard
- How to Deal with Umpires in Youth Baseball
- Is It Now Fashionable to Hate On Baseball Dads?
For information on hitting, see:
- How to Get Out of a Hitting Slump
- 4 Best Baseball Batting Aids (No. 3 is Free)
- 4 Hitting Drills You Need to Do Before Every Game
- 4 Old School Baseball Drills You Need to Be Using
For information on pitching, see:
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