Friday, October 31, 2008

"My Little Curly-Haired Boy"

Matt Stairs has always seemed like a nice, down-to-Earth guy. That's probably because he has a nice, down-to-Earth family:

"I just can't believe it," said his mom Thursday. "My little curly-haired boy, starting to play baseball ... it's hard to take in. I'm so happy and so proud of him" . . . "I always knew that Matt had a fair amount of talent, but you're not sure something like this is ever going to happen," said Wendell Stairs. "To finally get this far, it's hard to describe how you feel."
Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but it strikes me that, unlike so many other talented athletes, Stairs had folks that pretty much just let him go play and still maybe struggle a bit to fully understand everything that he does on a day-to-day basis. At least I hope that's true, because it's nice to imagine that someone can become an elite ballplayer even without insane little league parents and a life filled with travelling leagues and all of that jazz.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well Matt Stairs is canadian. So he has that going for him.

Also, if this was hockey, you can bet his parents would've been more "hands-on".

That's almost a religion up here :-)

Mark S said...

Amen to that brother.

Anonymous said...

APBA Guy-

The travelling league thing is like a cancer. My brother, who has 3 kids, was explaining how playing in travelling leagues can lead to a baseball scholarship. Except the cumulative cost of the travel over the child's baseball life exceeds the 4 year value of any baseball scholarship offered, as they are partial year for tuition only, basically.

But as many middle class families do them as they can, some even go into debt or take second jobs.

And this is fun how?

Anonymous said...

There are so many travel programs down here in Central Florida that I wonder at what point the level of play in travel ball simply becomes that of Little League?