College Wisdom

Given an off night from West Raleigh Baseball, we made the obvious choice last night to...attend a baseball game. Carolina hosted Winthrop (the Tar Heels won, 12-6, even without the aid of a Mudcat throwing out the first pitch), and after the game I ran into Jacob Stallings.

It's important to note here that Jacob Stallings is probably one of Asher's two favorite players on the current Carolina team. His dad, Kevin, is the head basketball coach at Vanderbilt but is better-known around Chapel Hill as a passionate Carolina baseball fan who thinks nothing of, say, making the nine-hour drive from Nashville to Tallahassee, Florida, this weekend for the UNC-FSU series. And not only does he make the drive, but it's clear there is nothing he would rather do. It is plainly obvious that Coach Stallings coaches basketball mostly to be able to support his baseball habit. Asher will tell you that Coach Stallings is also a lot of fun to play with at games, because he still remembers what it's like to have a six-year-old running around the house. Most of the time when Coach Stallings is at Boshamer you can find him making up some crazy baseball game with Asher, the rules of which are known only to them.

So we like Jacob a lot. Plus, he's a catcher, which means he gets to wear the catcher's gear, which automatically increases your coolness by a factor of four. Jacob has seen us around Boshamer a good bit over the winter, hitting in the batting cages and doing some throwing, and he is somewhat aware of West Raleigh Baseball and the fact that Asher really wanted to make a team this spring. So the first thing he said was, "How's Asher's baseball going?"

Since Jacob Stallings has been playing baseball for almost 20 years, and since he's very likely to be making it his profession when the major league draft comes around this June, I went into a detailed description of the Mudcats. I talked about the personnel, and I talked about this weekend's close losses (I was proud of myself for leaving out the part about the absurd scheduling), and I talked about Zach hitting a home run over the fence, which is still breathlessly discussed at our house on roughly the same level as other incredible feats of strength. Asher is more or less convinced that Superman wears Zach pajamas.

While realizing that Jacob did not actually want the full rundown on the Mudcats, I still thought I did a pretty fair job of detailing all the really important things that have happened this season--wins, losses, home runs, hits, errors, etc. Apparently, though, I left one thing out. Because all Jacob said in response was, "That's great. Is he having fun?"

Oh, that.

Well, yes he is. And his parents are, too. It's just that sometimes they get outsmarted by a college junior.