Do you have a garden?

Are you happy with the vegetables or flowers that come from the garden?

If not, do you: a) complain incessantly about the poor production; or b) get to work on better fertilizer, watering, and weeding?

The answer is (b). Nice job, Chummy.

The percentage of teenage boys who are reaching their middle teen years prepared to be responsible, self-starting, industrious, creative leaders of their school, neighborhood, or town nowadays is alarmingly low.

Does this mean all teenage boys?

Of course not.

It just means a whole chunk of boys this age do not appear ready to take on important roles in their world, or at least not as many boys as you would like.

And in any event, they’re not as ready to do these important things as girls the same age.

Why?

OK, apologists, all at once: “Girls mature faster than boys!”

Wrong. It is not just biology.

Want another possible answer?

T-ball.

Huh?

There was a fascinating article in a national newspaper the other day about kids and self-esteem, and whether the desire of busy adults to make sure their kids have self-esteem is so great that we both give the kids easy stuff to do when they are young, not challenging them significantly; and then, regardless of what task they succeed at, praise them until they are virtually waterboarded with “Good job!”

This whole topic came up again recently when the person credited (?!) with inventing T-ball died.

Jerry Sacharski was a fellow from Albion, Mich., who coached youth baseball. At some point around 1956, he saw real young kids showing up at their older brothers’ (not sisters, yet) Little League games. “I just couldn’t send them home,” he said. So he invented the game of T-ball, since the kids were too young and undeveloped to succeed at regular baseball.

I think his motives were good.

He was quoted in a l960 article as saying he put together what we would now call a “tee” from “metal pipe, garden hose and rubber.”

“It was a game designed to teach the pure fundamentals of baseball – throwing, catching, swinging a bat, and running the bases,” he said in an interview last year as he approached age 93.

That was the good news.

The bad news? The game got real popular about 30 years after that – for the wrong reasons, I would say.

In suburbs throughout America in the late 1970s and especially the early ’80s, many families suddenly had two working parents. This meant fewer parents available to coach. And fewer adults at games providing pitching to hitters at young ages that kept games going smoothly, and guaranteed batters would have something to swing at.

Often, high school kids were called upon to pitch. A high school kid is not an adult. He or she does not always understand the needs – physical and mental – of a child. And a high school kid is certainly not a parent, who understands a young child’s need to be challenged but also to succeed or make progress at a difficult task.

Many high school kids, candidly, were striking kids out.

Rather than increase the size of the ball used at the kindergarten level (e.g., use a beach ball), or encourage softer or easier pitching, suburban parents flocked in droves to T-ball equipment. They loved it! Johnny could get a hit! Johnny ran to first base? Johnny was happy! Johnny felt good about himself! Johnny’s mommy and daddy lathered him with praise!

That is more good news.

The bad news?

Johnny was passing a false test.

Johnny was being given something (almost literally) on a silver platter – a ball was placed on a flat-headed pole, about waist high; Johnny could swing whenever he was ready and just “pick” the ball off the tee.

Perhaps OK for a 5-year-old, but too many boys like Johnny, when they reached age 15, could not hit a pitched baseball well.

Especially once thrown really fast – or one that curved or one that made other, difficult-to-make-contact-with movement.

The 1980s and ’90s produced countless juvenile males who excelled at T-ball at age 5 or 6, but who then struggled mightily at ages 9 through 12, or certainly at ages 13 though 16. Then they quit.

My friend Gary Namm tuned into this issue in l989. He began an effort (kind of tongue-in-cheek, but not really) to urge Little Leagues to find another way to teach baseball to young boys and girls.

He thought T-ball made it all too easy for kids. He thought we were teaching boys early on that everything in life would be handed to them: Have a tough time with a task? Not to worry. We will restructure things, and make it easy! You will succeed! Don’t worry! And do so immediately!

He had T-shirts made up. They bore a fine-print message of 200 words or so, an essay describing the societal and cultural ills of T-ball. And the headline was a model of restraint and a let’s -find-some-middle-ground approach:

“TEE BALL IS A COMMUNIST PLOT! BAN TEE BALL NOW!”

It is interesting, now, to read the print on the T-shirt and see how, in the l980s, our society was fixated on competition with Japan that, in many instances, we were losing.

“Do you think, in Japan, they put their baseballs on a tee, on a silver platter, so their little kids can be sure and hit it? NO!! OF COURSE NOT!!” the T-shirt message said. “In Japan, they compete … some things in life are difficult … they don’t come easy … Hitting a baseball is one. Practice! Maybe you will get better. If you do, good! If you fail, you fail.”

His message on the $9.95 T-shirts (some still available through Libby-Mitchell Post Legion Baseball, P.O. Box 1, Scarborough 04070) went on to bemoan the mollycoddling of young males in modern society.

A bad lesson in T-ball, he concluded, is that you think you have achieved something difficult, but you haven’t. What kind of person is that helping to make for society, he asked.

“Pray for us, Heavenly Father!” the shirt message ended. “We are giving up. We are dumbing it down!”

“TEE BALL IS A COMMUNIST PLOT! BAN TEE BALL NOW!”

Was he correct? Probably, I think.

Working with teenage boys the past l5 years in high school baseball, basketball, and mock-trial competitions, I’ve noticed two trends:

l) hitting a baseball is very, very hard for them to do; and

2) the sense of adventure, the mindset of “Challenge me – go ahead!” is rare.

Girls have it hard in society, still, or at least harder than males. They have to fight and scrap to get opportunities in grades K-5 and then in middle school and high school. This is true with sports, community activities and interpersonal things. We do not worship girls the way we worship little boys. “Scarborough is China,” one of my friends likes to say. “We love boys; they are our future emperors.”

Some coaches pitch to kids in T-ball (Call the police, quick!). They think that requiring a youngster to hit a pitched sphere (of whatever size, large or small) is good training for baseball at later levels.

Perhaps some even think that pitching to kids – instead of placing the ball on a tee for the youngster – is a better trial for developing life skills.

My next-door neighbor, Alan Peoples, saw one of the T-shirts once. He read the headline and said, “Well, that is a nice understated, modest view of things.”

OK, OK. The thrust of the shirt message was drastic. But so is the need to develop boys who can help lead our world in the future – and keep up with girls. (Canvass girls you know and boys you know who have graduated from Scarborough High since 1995, and make notes: Which ones have left SHS with a plan, followed the plan, achieved their goals and come back to help others? I dare you to give me the results).

Jerry Sacharski, the inventor of Tee Ball, died recently. I didn’t know whether to celebrate the life of someone who no doubt was a loving, caring father, grandfather, husband, neighbor and coach, or fly my flag on the pole half staff.

What do you think?