Cal Ripken Tournament Brings Best Out of Glasgow

In Little League, the world is yours, plain as the undiscerning eye makes it.

The basepath is a highway; the ball, your toll. Each swing is a time capsule, vacuum-sealed and stored in the mind’s boundless vault upon each successive step into the beige batter’s box dirt.

The unadorned present whistles ever-tangibly on the cool, dry Montana breeze. He whose aim is unwavering – to move the bat along the selfsame downward plane regardless of chirping parents and the unknowable whims of the umpire’s tongue – is he who sees the truth of his reason. Love is pointed habitualization. Habitualization is but doing.

Eight groups of 10-year-olds descended upon Glasgow this weekend for the annual Cal Ripken youth baseball tournament. Eye black painted meticulously beneath sparkling blue eyes, water bottles clinking against metallic bat barrels as the boys run to set their equipment in the dugouts, their bags jostling against their backs, straining with their shoulders, holding their owners’ feet to a brisk trot, yet failing to slow their effervescence all the same – one almost forgets oneself in the deep thickets and snowcover of memory banks long thought dormant.

The young Glaswegians’ tournament ended after three games; a 20-17 loss to Glendive was followed by a 12-11, eked-out victory over Big Muddy. But for the local lads, the run to the finals was not to be. They dropped their next matchup, 15-7, against Bozeman, and the day was spent.

Bozeman progressed to the championship game, where they defeated Glendive, 8-4. While a spectator may opine that Glasgow’s tournament showing was an unsuccessful one, to the attuned little leaguer, any crowd-perceived dichotomy between success and failure speaks in a foreign tongue. Good and bad is a bridge too far – a bridge to the island of excess, brooding, and the old-and-broken myth of longing for something that is not, and will never be insofar as one continues along the specious path of hope. To the attuned little leaguer, knowledgeable in his game and his game alone, the field remains an easel; his swing, the one means of creation.

Cal Ripken 10 U Tournament

Full Results

Glendive 20, Glasgow 17

Miles City 6, Sidney 3

Bozeman 13, Big Muddy 2

Gallatin Valley 11, Belgrade 1

Glasgow 12, Big Muddy 11

Miles City 10, Gallatin 7

Glendive 4, Bozeman 3

Sidney 4, Belgrade 2

Bozeman 15, Glasgow 7

Belgrade 14, Miles City 13

Glendive 11, Big Muddy 1

Galatin 9, Sidney 5

Glendive 15, Gallatin 3

Bozeman 15, Miles City 1

Bozeman 8, Glendive 4