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 becomes a family disgrace.

Residents of Haverhill, Mass., take the game so solemnly that the town was thrown into a tizzy when the coach of the local Rotary Club-sponsored team allowed Sharon Poole, a redhaired, freckle-faced girl of twelve, to don uniform No. 9 and fill a vacancy in the otherwise all-boys group. Batting cleanup, she drove in a run in her first game, went hitless in her second, and earned her teammates' respect with her agility in center field as the team won both games. But Coach Donald Sciuto kept getting complaints from parents about allowing Sharon to play.

The local league's coaches and managers met, decided she must quit, and that the two games in which she played must be erased from the records. Publicly, they clung to the technicality that Sharon had not properly tried out for the team and thus was ineligible to play, but privately they conceded that they did not want their sons competing with a girl. They also dismissed Sciuto as president of the league. Confused but not embittered by the fuss, Sharon said she had been treated "just like one of the boys" until the parents began "squawking." Said she: "I just wanted to play baseball."

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