The Nation: Parental Foul Balls

Neighborhood baseball was once a game that kids played with a borrowed mitt, perhaps, and often in tattered jeans and torn tennis shoes. It was one of America's summertime delights, pursued in high spirits. There might be a hassle or two over a bum call at first base, but a boy who dropped a pop fly suffered only the personal agony of embarrassment. Now, as highly organized Little League baseball, it is all too often a grim and tidily uniformed surrogate competition for adults, in which the stakes are parental egos and junior's gaffe...

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