This is baseball practice for my kids, but something else for me.

A s a latchkey kid, and the child of a single mother, the only organized sport I played was Catholic Youth basketball. There were six boys in my class, and the five of us who played were the starting five by the second year. You can imagine how good we were, drawing from such a deep pool. Wearing number 10, I was little more than a decoy on the court. I set a lot of picks in failed pick and rolls. I would walk or take the public bus home from practice. But organized basketball is a winter sport.

In the summers, I might go out and join a whiffle ball game in the nearby park, but I envied the neighbor boys who played baseball, which was the favorite sport of the house I grew up in. My grandmother would force me to watch Mets games and call my attention to her Mets heroes, Darryl Strawberry or John Franco. We didn’t have the organizational resources as a family to put me in Little League. I was the equivalent of an iPad kid undergoing full brain rot in the 1980s. Mom was up at her office job, grandma was in the garden. I was in front of a Nintendo. I didn’t get my first baseball glove until I was in my 30s. My brother-in-law bought it for me so we could play catch on family beach vacations.

The same is not true for my sons. They also would like to be indoors, playing with screened devices, but we have the organizational clout to keep them busy. The challenge is interesting them in baseball when so many of their classmates have been inducted into the international cult of “football,” by which I mean soccer. You are more likely to see a Ronaldo or Messi jersey at school than one for Aaron Judge.

But for a few years now, I have introduced them to T-ball and Little League. We find times to get out in the yard and just toss the ball around. This is practice for them, but something else for me. My six-year-old has a small glove, and he only catches balls thrown to him gently, and arcing into his glove. But he has somehow figured out how to throw like a demon. It’s not intentional, but you look at this pipsqueak boy and expect a lob, something you could bunt. Instead, it comes as a heater. Directly at your glove, or maybe at your chin. I’ve seen him make unsuspecting coaches dive to the ground as if they’d been assaulted by Pedro Martinez. “Good boy,” I think.

My eight-year-old is the soccer nut. Except on rainy days or at night, he won’t stay long on an iPad. Because he’ll inevitably find a way to watch historic soccer highlights, and then he’ll get that itchy feeling, put on his sneakers, and kick the ball against our house like he’s trying to demolish it. He made the local travel soccer team. His baseball fandom was locked in, more tenuously, by the Mets making their incredible playoff run last year. Two years of Little League, one travel ball tryout, he didn’t make the team. A few months later, another tryout comes. Practice with dad, a pep talk with his uncle. He goes out and puts on an absolute hitting clinic during the tryouts. With a glove already at the edge of too loose, he snags everything behind him. He has a lot to learn yet, but he walked out of there and said, “I did what Uncle Chris said, I didn’t get discouraged, I think I made the team.”

And last night, he had his first practice with his first selective team. His parents were trying to get intel on the league and the coaches from other parents. I was overwhelmed with work and other household management concerns. I was also being devoured by the bugs on one of the muggiest evenings of the year. He was nervous, knowing he’s not the best player on his team, and other kids have a little more experience. But he loosened up and listened. As he finished a session with the coach in the batting cage, I caught him when he thought no one was looking, and he clenched his fist and smiled to himself. Another nasty fly bit into me, the happiest man on the planet.