You want to know one of the dumbest cliches ever coined about the great American pastime?
There's no crying in baseball.
No crying in baseball?
Tell that to a west Encinitas kid who had every right to sob a river after learning one of the game's most painful lessons imaginable.
Here's the scene, pieced together from conversations with a manager and several Little League officials:
It's the bottom of the fifth in the Little League district championship game Thursday at Mountain View Park in Escondido.
Encinitas All-Stars vs. Escondido American.
The score's 6-5 in favor of Escondido. The winner takes a big step closer to Williamsport; the loser bids goodbye to childhood dreams of glory.
For the Encinitas nine, the all-stars suddenly lined up in their favor.
Two outs, the bases loaded, and their No. 3, a prolific power hitter, was up.
Boom! A grand slam. The Encinitas dugout empties. Four runners dance in to score. Encinitas is leading 9-6 – it was right there, on the scoreboard – with just one inning to play.
That's when the game turned foul or fair, depending on your point of view.
After an Escondido appeal choreographed from the dugout, the umpires ruled that the runner on third base had failed to touch home plate.
The boy was called out, nullifying all four of the Encinitas runs. Inning over.
Escondido celebrated its narrow escape. In the stands, parental hell was breaking loose over the out-at-home call.
“We worried about calling the police,” said Kris Quinonez, the president of Escondido National, the league hosting the playoff game.
But wait.
There's more cruelty to come.
Baseball couldn't be content with that one mental error that one player will rue forever.
No, by the game's sadistic logic, there would have to be more.
In the bottom of the sixth – and last – inning, the cleanup hitter for Encinitas stroked a double, giving hope to the coastal team and its angry parents.
The Nos. 5 and 6 hitters made outs, leaving it up to No. 7 to breathe life back into the dying season.
You guessed it.
The player who'd failed to touch home strode to the plate with a bat in his hands.
This is where Disney would have given him a break. At worst, let him walk and prolong the inning.
Or at best, let him send it out of the park for a walk-off home run. After rounding the bases, he drives both his cleats deep into home plate as his teammates mob him.
But this is baseball, for crying out loud.
He struck out.
Game – and season – over.
Tell me you wouldn't weep a river if that was – or wasn't – your kid.
You don't have to unload the purist's cliches:
Rules are rules.
Adversity builds character.
Close counts only in horseshoes.
I get all that stuff.
But what I don't get is the desire of a team, any team, to win on a technicality after the ball is over the fence.
I asked Jose Balderas, the Encinitas manager who by all accounts handled himself with class even as the team's parents went bonkers, if he'd have appealed in the same situation.
“I would not have appealed,” the veteran coach said after a pause. “The ball went over the fence. The kid deserved the home run. These are 12-year-old kids.”
Balderas told me that during this whole nightmare he found himself thinking of Sara Tucholsky, the senior softball player from Western Oregon University who hit her first home run in an April playoff game against Central Washington University.
Rounding first base, Tucholsky injured her leg and couldn't complete her home-run trot.
Though it was a crucial game, two Central Washington players carried Tucholsky around the bases to score the run because it was against the rules for her own teammates to help her.
When she touched home base, Tucholsky recalled, “My whole team was crying. Everybody in the stands was crying. My coach was crying. It touched a lot of people.”
Yes, there is crying in baseball.
Tears of pain, of course, but also tears of joy at chivalrous sportsmanship.
If the Escondido manager had rejected the appeal option, I'd have been writing a column in praise of her today.
Win or lose, she'd have been my hero if she'd said something like this to her players after they'd lost honorably:
“Look, we could have appealed and maybe won, but we didn't. We didn't win on the field. They did. Now go shake their hands. I'm so proud of us I could cry.”
Logan Jenkins (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
