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Date of publication (more or less): May 6, 1997
Copyright © by Michael Finley; all rights reserved.

A web page for the Riverdogs

by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1996 by Michael Finley

My son's summer baseball team has not even met as I write this, but as coach I have already created a web site for the team, called the RiverDogs. It lists the kids' names, when and where the games are played, and asks parents to help out with the weekly treats. You can see it, if this sort of thing fascinates you at http://mfinley.com/riverdog.htm.

Why a web page? Because it's fun, and kids are into that. You can create a newspaper in which you are the star, or your kids are stars. In a group like a baseball team, which doesn't really see one another very often or for very long, a web page can be a unifying device, like the red tee-shirt my RiverDogs will wear, or like a class ring or school yearbook.

And because it's easy. Putting up a web page used to be pretty frightening. You had to master at least a little of the language of the web, HTML. And you had to understand how to upload material to the site via ftp -- not difficult, but not a snap for casual computer users, either. Now you can edit and load a page directly from your browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

And if you use Windows 95 or a Macintosh, you are freed from the filename strictures of eight characters plus a three-character suffix. This is important because the "home base" file for your site must be named index.html, which is an impossible filename for a pre-Windows 95 PC. So after uploading it as index.htm, you had to rename the suffix to give it that last "l." And you had to do this every time you made the eeniest, beensiest change. A small thing, but enough to fry the grown-up mind.

But this home page is for kids. When I was a kid, the local paper managed to report the scores of even peewee baseball. I remember once I pitched a game and won (memorable in itself), and savoring seeing my name in 5-point type among the boxscores in the Lorain Journal.

My plan isn't to publish scores; we could lose every game, after all. But I think the kids will enjoy seeing overnight reportage of the good things that happen during the games: the kid who surprises everyone by getting a hit, good plays in the field, anything funny that happens during a game, like a dog running onto the field, or buying pizza afterwards. The website will be our own private sports page.

I can scan a Polaroid picture of the team, or even do individual pictures, and make a fancy program for everyone.

This will be my fourth year coaching. I started when Jon was 5, at the T-ball level. I explained the basics of the game to the kids but I overlooked the basics of the basics. The first time an opposing batter hit the ball through the infield, every player left his or her position and headed for the ball, where they fought among one another for the privilege of picking it up. I called it our "swarming defense."

But by the end of the first season, the girl who showed up in tears her first time at the plate was getting on base every time. She and another girl made a nifty double play in the last game, and I almost burst.

I once had a boy make an unassisted triple play at second base that was so complicated and so comical and took so long that I can't describe it. People who had gone weeks without seeing a conventional out stood around with their mouths open, trying to comprehend what had happened. The triple play didn't count anyway, as the other team gets to bat around regardless of "outs."

What a different game than the one I played when I was nine. We met on a playing field behind the U.S. Automatic plant in our Ohio town, and the umpire might be drunk, and our coaches -- our fathers -- might get arrested for fighting. Winning was everything, and the game was often played to placate estranged parental egos, not so kids could have a little fun chasing a ball.

Not every kid thrives. I remember one boy who got zero pleasure holding a bat. In the field his attention was everywhere but on the game. He seemed sullen and out of synch. One game, an Army Reserves training troop carrier from the airport zoomed overhead, though, and this kid started bubbling over about what kind of plane it was, its capacity, and how he had a model just like it hanging in his room. He never did quite glom onto baseball, but it was nice knowing there was something he loved and was good at.

When another 7 year old, named Cooper, found out I wrote a computer column, he battered me incessantly with his insights into the latest Pentium chip, the C++ language, and asynchronous communications protocols. Here was a kid who was up to his ears in diodes, who might need an extra dimension to stick with baseball another year, or two.

Cooper, this web page is for you.

Michael Finley batted a steady .212 through three seasons of Little League baseball in Amherst, Ohio in the 1950s.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com

Michael Finley's book Techno-Crazed, from Peterson's, contains more information about computers and stress injuries. Visit Mike at http://mfinley.com. Or write him at mfinley@mfinley.com.

To contact Mike Finley ... mfinley@mfinley.com