A team of 10-year-olds reminded me what's important

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Most nights from April through October I can be found at a ballpark. Every ball game is an opportunity for discovery. However small, each nugget of information or understanding enhances the enjoyment of the game. Learning, as the Chinese proverb goes, is like rowing upstream: to cease is to fall back.

Take Monday night at Fenway Park. I learned that Tigers manager Jim Leyland, in all his years of managing, has won no more than two arguments with umpires, that one of the Detroit pitchers, who shall remain nameless for now, has been tipping his pitches, that former Red Sox outfielder Ellis Burks so disliked the intense media environment in Boston that he asked the team to trade him, and that Detroit rookie reliever Joel Zumaya, who can throw 100 mph, admits to occasionally trying to throw as hard as he can, which is how he came to throw one pitch at 102 that night.

Nothing of Confucius-like heavy wisdom there, just another day to appreciate the nuanced beauty of the game.

Mind you, though, I am talking about baseball, not just major league baseball, because many of the summer nights I spend with the game take place at diamonds on which the bases are only 60 feet apart. As rookie manager of the 10-year-old Cal Ripken Baseball team in Montgomery, N.J., I came to understand that the size of the lessons can have an inverse proportional relationship to the size of the field and the players.

Our team, made up of 12 players who had played for three different teams last year and chosen from among only about three dozen players who tried out in a small town, began as an unknown quantity. It ended up in the Cal Ripken World Series in Lafayette, La., having won districts, states and regionals and, in the final count, 40 out of 44 games.

Winning, without the need to apologize, is fun. But the real reward is learning from 10-year-old kids, who have the power to teach us if we are smart enough to listen to them, to keep ourselves paddling upstream.

Here are six lessons I learned from them.

1. Free yourself from expectations. Expectations are only boundaries to your imagination. At 10, anything is possible. Our team was five outs away from elimination in the Mid-Atlantic Regionals, losing 3-0. And then, after hitting one home run the entire season to that point, we suddenly went home run, double, single, home run to win the game 4-3. (The home runs were the first for those two players in their lives.) I used to think the greatest game I ever saw in person was Game 7 of the 1991 World Series. Not anymore.

2. Be wary of adults who don't smile around children. We had an umpire in regionals who refused to let batters take practice swings in between pitches, who refused to let the catcher visit the mound to talk to the pitcher and who called a third strike on a batter while the boy was getting instructions from his third base coach (the umpire had refused to grant him time). "Don't hold up my game,'' the umpire told my catcher after informing him he could not visit the mound. Our kids were intimidated by the old goat, not to mention his I'm-in-a-hurry-to-get-out-of-here strike zone.

There was another impatient umpire at the World Series, who barked at me when my center fielder wasn't in place to start an inning in time to his liking, even after I explained to him, "He's in the bathroom. He's a 10-year-old kid! He's gotta go." Memo to umpires, managers, coaches, parents and fans: It's not about you and your agenda any longer.