Viewpoint : Victories for our team don’t show up on the scoreboard. : A Little Zen and the Little League

I’ve been thinking about winning and losing since my 9-year-old son started playing Little League baseball this spring.

His team is in last place. They have won only one game, and their last two games ended by scores of 20-3 and 22-4. I haven’t seen such bungling since Cathie Wright tried to improve her daughter’s driving record.

Midway through the last game, one of the opposing players hit a fly ball to the centerfielder, who missed it. “Way to go,” called his dad, our manager. He was serious, adding that “before, he would have run from the ball.”

Victories for our team don’t show up on the scoreboard.

“You know,” said Liz, whose son plays shortstop, “two mothers on the other team last week were saying that the amazing thing about our team is that no matter how badly they get beat, they never get down. Other teams have said the same thing.”

I smiled at her, but I didn’t know whether I should be upset or pleased. One part of me cried out, “Never accept defeat.” When your enemy has cut off your arms and legs and disemboweled you, stick your tongue out at him. Smiling and feeling good about yourself after you get trounced is the kind of attitude that will turn the United States into a ninth-rate nation where the commissars make you stand in line for hours at Naugles.

Another part of me thought, “These kids may be Zen masters with baseball gloves and their shoelaces untied.” They accept defeat with the placidity of monks.

Because Liz was right. The players don’t get down, even the best ones, those few who can catch and hit. They occasionally ask the score, but their faces don’t fall when they hear the humiliating tally of the opposition, threatening to reach triple figures. Perhaps the team is running a betting pool on the margin of defeat, but I prefer to think they go out each inning thinking they have a chance of winning.

“That a way to go,” said our team manager Monday night, after we got two runs in the last inning. “You’re only 18 down.”

Their problem is, they are small, young and inexperienced. The hitters struggle to hit the pitches, even though they can barely reach the plate with their bats. Their minds tell them to stay in the batter’s box, but their feet seem to remember the last time they were hit by a wild pitch. I’ve noticed that if the feet want to get the heck out of the batter’s box, the mind better get ready to follow.

All this is something that the manager, a blustery man who loves the kids and is doing his best to turn them into a proper team, bravely refuses to accept. After Monday’s game he lectured them and called an extra practice and sent them off for sodas.

Sipping happily from his drink, which he cradled in his mitt, just the way Willie Randolph does it, my son later celebrated the game. “I got to play second base the whole game,” he said quietly, as though afraid he might shatter the memory by speaking too loud.

The fact that 22 opposing players ran right past his base without any interference from him didn’t upset him. He was content to be out of his usual position in the wilderness of centerfield, where one has to contend with wandering hot dog-eating spectators, nerds and dangerous fly balls that could hit you on the head.

At 9, one needn’t deal with all of the world’s challenges, just the parts one can handle. Hunched over, hands on your knees, looking like a real player, yelling chatter at the batter, knowing he could hear it and possibly be distracted by your personal cry of “humm batter”--that was so much a thrill that the score of the game was secondary.

I had seen players on teams with better records who threw tantrums and moped. One catcher became angry over a play and heaved the ball into centerfield, allowing several runs to score. There is little of that on our team, though one player occasionally walks to the plate with a cookie in his hand.

My son has not only known losing. A couple of years ago we lived in another state, and he competed on a soccer team. That team won second place one year and the league championship the next.

The coach was a trim, athletic dentist who believes that life is competitive and that you had better get ready for it early. To say nothing of flossing regularly.

He barked out crisp orders and the team followed them without question. Dissatisfied with one of the nation’s best public schools, he took his son out in the first grade; the boy had to take an exam to qualify for the private school.

I agreed with the coach that life is competitive. But I think it’s less linear than he seems to see it in laying out his son’s future on a flow chart that deposits him safely in Harvard, where he will make the contacts that guarantee his future.

Besides, victory bred its own problems. The soccer team eventually developed a star system that devolved special favor upon a few players. They carried themselves slightly aloof from the rest of the team.

This status was a burden for the talented players. If the team lost, or if he lost the ball, the coach’s son collapsed on the field in tears.

Is there a lesson in all this? I’m not sure. But I don’t think that for all their victories, that soccer team had a great deal more fun than my son’s last-place baseball team.

One difference between life and baseball is that in life they don’t keep score. If they did, my son’s team would still have to ask what it is.