Create a lineup that will hit a home run this summer
Vacations, summer sports, theatre, outdoor toys, wonderful books, sunny days and fun family outings – these are some of the hallmarks of summer.
As we put together this issue of City Parent, each summery section reminded me of summers past and prodded me to plan for this one. We all know how short this much anticipated season can seem. It actually is three months long but when broken down into vacation time and weekends, it’s more like days instead of months.
Many of our summer evenings and weekends were spent watching our sons play baseball, practicing with them and driving around southern Ontario to a few tournaments each season. The sport consumed a lot of our time but we enjoyed it.
Those memories caused me to reach out to Gabe Diamond, founder of True North Sports Camps. He emailed me about the upswing of interest in baseball and increased registration in the sport thanks to the winning ways of the Toronto Blue Jays. Last season the Jays came closer to winning the World Series than they have in years.
In fact, they haven’t reached the pinnacle of the sport since 1993, the year our first son was born.
Not sure that our infant son absorbed the fact that the Jays won their second World Series in a row that year but he certainly heard his parents cheering. His teams often performed better than the Jays in subsequent seasons and game after game, he heard his parents cheer him and his teammates on.
As Diamond explained, baseball is a thinking game. There’s lots of time to think as batters go through their rotation and then suddenly there’s an amazing hit or heroic catch or sizzling pitch to strike out a batter. The thrill is in anticipating and then experiencing those moments, as a player or as a spectator. More kids will have those experiences this summer and that’s great.
Learn more about the surge in baseball’s popularity in the Junior section of this issue and check out all of the other summer-inspired stories.
Put me in coach for the fun and games of summer.
