Baseball and Perspective

My son is starting Little League baseball, which means I am probably at least 2-3 years behind the curve, since many of the parents have had their kids on teams of one sort or another since kindergarten. But no matter.  He--and our whole family--will catch up, and if he likes it, I'm sure it will soon be as if we've been doing this forever.
 
As I sit outside a school gym, waiting for him and about 150 other kids his age to be evaluated and put on teams, I am struck by the amount of perspective I am gaining on my own life by spending two hours with several hundred eight year old boys.  Today, I have learned:
 
1. The noise created by three siblings in a largely carpeted apartment is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the sound created by 150 third grade boys, some with metal bats, standing in a decidedly un-carpeted public school hallway.
 
2. Never put a metal bat in the hand of an 8 year old boy who is going to have to wait on line for a half hour (I didn't, but a whole lot of people did). It's nearly impossible for them to resist swinging (at a person or at the door that is locked), and you definitely don't want to be responsible for that!
 
3. There's nothing like a big group to make you appreciate your own child, who might not want to wait for anything at home, but waits patiently in public while chaos is going on around him.
 
4. Like so many activities we get our kids into, baseball cuts across huge ethnic, social, and economic boundaries that we might never cross ourselves. The list of names called included just about every ethnicity I could imagine. I hope that the whole experience will as well.
 
5. In life, as in baseball, it's important to develop a perfect pitch, catch whatever balls are lobbed at you, and always come out swinging.
 
Like my daughters' play rehearsals, which run our family's organizational life, my son's baseball is likely to become the centerpiece of many weekends for the next few months. He's so used to being carted to everyone else's events, this stands to be a big change for him, and, I hope, one he will like. Because I have a feeling there's a lot more I can learn about life--from baseball.