Opening Day!

I mean our son’s little league, Vancouver’s own Little Mountain Baseball, Canada’s oldest Little League and, with 600+ players up through the age of 12, quite the going concern. The Little Mountain in question is a pretty big hill in the middle of Vancouver whose name constitutes part of my neighborhood’s.

My son, now 11, has been playing since he was four; I’ve coached and team-parented and generally been involved all those years. Just now I discover that LMB has no Wikipedia entry, although it has a history page on Facebook and is pretty deeply lodged in middle-Vancouver culture. Hmm, there’s an opportunity for someone.

Anyhow, every year right around April Fools’ Day, LMB has its Opening Day. Traditionally, all the divisions, ranging from the preschoolers in “Blast Ball” through to the terribly serious 12-years-olds in Majors, parade in led by a piper; some advance organizational consultation is required.

The next three pictures are just kids wearing baseball outfits and being cute.

After they march in, awards are handed out, speeches are made, and various ceremonies ensue. Local celebrities whose kids are involved tend to pop up, this year including Premier Christy Clark and local Member of Parliament assuming he gets re-elected Don Davies. Both were gracious, amusing, and brief.

Back to the event; the ceremonies include the national anthem, the recitation of the Little League Pledge (not the official God-and-Country version, thank goodness), the official First Pitch, and so on. I was hanging with some other LMB parents once and somebody said that these days, childrens’ lives include remarkably little ceremony, and having one from time to time is probably good for them. Hard to disagree.

Anyhow, here’s the gaggle of Little Leaguers who were selected to sing O Canada and seized upon its completion as an opportunity to whoop it up a bit.

A word is in order about the larger boy in red tossing his hat in the air. He’s a member of last year’s LMB all-star team, which won the city, then the provincial, then the Canadian championship and went off to the Little League World Series, where they did OK against Latin America but were eventually whacked by Taiwan; not, I gather, an untypical outcome at such events.

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