“Man, this is baseball. You gotta stop thinking. Just have fun. I mean, if you were having fun you would’ve caught that ball”
One of my favorite kid movies is the Sand Lot. It speaks to my heart and pulls me back to my days as a child when I had the joy of playing for the LOVE OF THE GAME. It reminds me that this is why these little boys are playing ball; BECAUSE THEY LOVE THE GAME
My oldest son has just started Little League Tball. I think I was more excited to see him play than he was of playing. To me it represents America in it’s purest form. As Terence Mann said from Field of Dreams, “The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America…has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”
I remember as a kid grabbing my mitt (yes, even as a girl I had a mitt), running to the end of our cul-de-sac to play ball with the kids on the block. I never seemed to get tired while playing. Time seemed to stand still when I had a bat and a ball. The only thing that brought us back to reality was when the street lights came on and we knew it was time to go home.
(Does anyone else remember the streetlight rule? Streetlights come on and you have to go in).
(Does anyone else remember the streetlight rule? Streetlights come on and you have to go in).
Some of my happiest memories as a child where when the whole family got to go to an Angels ball game. We packed our peanuts and glove (just in case we got to catch a fly ball) and headed out to Anaheim for a night of wonder and excitement. Those were the days when Reggie Jackson was the star of the Angels. Those were the days when they sported the classic dark blue colors; those where the days before Disney owned them; those were the days when they were the Anaheim Angels and not the Los Angeles Angels (Anaheim happens to be in Orange County in case anyone is keeping track). I don’t like change in Baseball.
But I digress. The point of this shoot was to document my son’s tball game. To capture the innocence and purity of this little five year old and all his buddies.
When these little guys dream of playing in the major league, they don’t think of making millions of dollars or getting commercial contracts
Their dreams are unadulterated
Their dreams are of being a part of something bigger then themselves
Their dreams are of the game.
I wanted the photos that were un-posed and caught in the moment.
I wanted to create a document that showed the timelessness of little boys in America
As a mother and photographer, I wanted to capture every nuance of this brief period of time
I wanted to catch what happened on and off the field
The moment they hit the ball for the first time off the coach pitch and not the tee.
Their first pair of little cleats
(I plan on keeping Kaleb’s and hanging them up someday)
A time when their helmets where too big for their little heads
It’s the small details I want to remember
I wanted to capture the photos that told their own story and did not need words
All a child really needs to have fun is a bat and a ball. The simple things!
The batting order of these little guys will someday be a distant memory.
What will these little players do with their lives? What will they become?
Is their a future Major League Player amongst these?
The Game Ball for the MVP
Kaleb has his ball displayed in his room and will most likely keep it the rest of his life
What I can’t put into words, I capture with my lens
We all have dreams. When we were children our dreams seemed totally within our reach. Dreams kept us alive and our spirits soaring! Take away all the the million dollars contracts of the pro baseball world and you are left with the raw dreams of little boys playing with a bat and ball. This is what I saw on the field of these 5 and 6 year old t-ball playing boys. The innocent days are such a small fleeting time in ones life. It’s like catching lightening in a bottle. All children have it. The challenge is keeping this once you get older.