Day 1

Chef (Zach) and I finally arrived at CDP Saturday morning. For those unfamiliar with Cooperstown Dreams Park, it's a baseball complex with a lodging and support services for the lodging (food, etc) onsite. Going in, my expectations were that the grounds would be beautiful, the lodging would be spartan, and beyond that it would match what you get on the website a lot of cheap patriotism and cheap nostalgia. I've been to the website dozens of times now, and if I get one more reference to yesteryear, I'm gonna yesterpuke. The cheap nostalgia was not on display at CDP. Cheap patriotism? Roger that. If blowing your nose with Old Glory wasn't considered borderline sacrilege, the Kleenex here would be designed like the Stars and Stripes.

On the lodging front, spartan would be spot on. Each team gets its own clubhouse/barracks, which is basically a sardine can with less brine. 2 rows of 4 metal bunks.

There are no games Saturday. Day 1 is all about orientation and hammering home the Arbeit Macht Frei ethos of the Cooperstown Dreams Park. After some time to ourselves, we were brought, cattle-like, to the orientation session. This included a keynote address from the visionary behind the CDP, Lou Presutti, shown below modeling the first version of the CDP Uniform.

Uncle Lou has created something amazing in CDP. He also, in his reactionary, old millionaire fart way, worries about the wrong stuff. Primarily uniforms. Kids are required to wear their jersey with the pants rolled up to the knee. The reasons for this are probably similar to the reasons it is unlawful to cross into Minnesota with a duck on your head. Kids can be suspended for having their jerseys untucked. Seriously. Most damnable, each team gets an unattractive blue jersey and red jersey, and this is the playing garb for the year. Because blue and red are American colors. Red is also a very popular color in China and the old USSR, but don't tell Lou that. How awesome would it be to see 104 teams, many of whom would design something special for the occasion, showing their colors? Pretty awesome. But it doesn't happen, so that the kids can fulfill some guys imagining of hack Americana.

Fortunately, the great thing about kids is that these weird obsessions can't keep them from having an awesome time. Down time is spent trading pins, working on baseball, playing Frisbee, and just being themselves.

The afternoon included the Opening Ceremonies.Big old parade of 104 teams. Pretty boring, except for the skills competition. We came close to getting to the Finals in Around the Horn Plus, in which 9 kids have to make 11 throws as quick as they could. No major errors, but a few throws just off the mark were enough to keep us from moving on. Considering how many good teams made boatloads of mistakes, the team did great.

No real problems getting the kids to bed by 10:30. And we did it without drugging them.