Lucas Update

I’ve got a couple updates about Lucas and my baseball tutoring gig.

He had a pretty good season off the bench. He did some pinch hitting and got some playing time at 2^nd and center (that gave him a chance to show off that arm I had nothing to do with lol.) He batted .260, not bad at all, although the sample size wasn’t very big. The highlight of his season probably happened in the field: he made an impossible catch, rolled over, and flipped the ball to 1^st, getting the out. I’ve seen the video someone took: it really was a Kiké Hernandez play, and, yeah, me and all those games of Kiké Hernandez Catch me and Lucas played deserve some of the credit. And, yeah, I was dang proud of Lucas when he showed me the replay.

I’m going to have some time off from working with him this summer, since he’s going to baseball camp for 4 weeks.

I remember having to beg my parents to send me to baseball camp. I got to go several summers running, so I know something about them. There are fun ones and there are military drill ones. I was very serious about baseball as a kid, but not so serious that I didn’t want to have fun at camp. Y’all probably guessed that that meant plenty of time for swimming. I mean, you’re still a kid…and, even if you can play baseball all day with your buddies back home, baseball camp is pretty intense and all those drills they put you through can stop being fun, even if they help your game. So you need some time for just running and splashing around. The camp I liked best even had some arts and crafts time. No, we didn’t make lanyards like Melanie Kate made when she went to camp lol. But they did show us how to make balls, bats and gloves. That was super interesting and super helpful. The more you know your equipment, the better. It was so interesting that they got a bunch of athletic teenage boys to sit still and pay attention.

So Mrs. Andrews actually brought me into consult about what camp to send Lucas to. Obviously I didn’t know anything firsthand about West Coast baseball camps, but I could kinda tell what they were like from their websites and brochures. I think the one we picked out was one of the fun ones. 4 weeks can be a long time at a place you hate. Come to think of it, I don’t think Lucas has ever been away from home before, and, yeah, even at the coolest baseball camp in the world, you’re gonna get homesick for the first few days. But once you realize you’re with a bunch of other kids who eat, sleep and breathe baseball, you don’t miss sleeping in your own bed so much anymore.

So Lucas should be okay.

Maybe I’ll have enough time free from Lucas to sit for Sabrina. Although I did get a call from one of Lucas’ teammates’ fathers who heard about what I’d done with Lucas and wondered if I could work with his boy. I didn’t know what to answer, so I said I’d call him back. I still haven’t. I’m not sure what to tell him. The money would be cool, but there are only so many hours in the day, and, while 1 baseball pupil has been super fun, I’m not sure what it would be like having 2.