By Dan Brosgol
Sometimes little kids do great things.
And make no mistake, 10-year old baseball players are still little. They might dress in shiny baseball uniforms and talk a big game, but at the same time, they’re just kids. They talk through their anxieties, act nervous, show their emotions, and overreact to striking out. At the same time, though, every successful endeavor on the field, and every time they overcome adversity helps them mature and gives them valuable confidence and experience.
Case in point, this summer’s Bedford Baystate C team that has opened the summer season with a 7-1 record in the Baystate Baseball Tournament of Champions.
The Baystate Tournament of Champions is a summer travel baseball league for kids ages 8-13, in which teams are broken down into divisions to begin the summer and play two different two-week qualifying rounds to attempt to qualify for the August Tournament of Champions. Each two-week qualifying round concludes with the top teams playing in mini-tournaments (“trophy weekends”). After the first two rounds, the cumulative points are totaled and the top 16 teams play a final two-week round to qualify for the championship weekend. It’s a schedule not for the light of heart.
In the first round, the Baby Bucs played some tight games over Lexington, Lincoln-Sudbury, and Acton, but emerged with a 5-1 record, the top seed in their division, and a berth in the opening round trophy weekend tournament.
After a 3-2 win over Melrose on Saturday, which featured a dramatic late-game rally, the Bedford Baystate C team went to bed that night with the daunting prospect of taking on the big, bad, undefeated team from Billerica on Sunday. The kids were already chattering about it on Saturday—“Did you hear that they mercy-ruled Lexington today? I hear they bunt and run like crazy.” And from what I gathered before the game on Sunday, not a few kids woke up that morning with serious butterflies in their stomachs and anxiety about facing the Baystate equivalent of the 1927 Yankees—at least that’s what they thought.
So imagine the pure joy and satisfaction when Bedford grabbed the lead in the second inning and never looked back. A game that featured great pitching and defense, and some very timely hitting, ended with the final fly ball settling into the centerfielder’s glove and the boys in blue holding their gold trophies in celebration.
So while we bask in the glory of a character-building win, the work is far from complete. The next qualifying round begins on July 19, and the competition will only get tougher, but as of today these little kids are the second-seeded team out of the 28 teams in C division and brought a gold trophy home to Bedford for the first time in years. With eight games in the books, the expectations have been ramped up just a bit, and all eyes are on the prize—qualifying for the Tournament of Champions and maybe, just maybe, bringing home some more hardware come August.
Click here to print Baystate C for your fridge.
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