I went to the Brewer game last Friday night.  I was with my boyfriend and some friends.  My son coincidentally had tickets to go to the same game with his dad.

When Eric Gagne took the mound, it seemed that the entire crowd at Miller Park started booing.  Then Gagne gave up a home run and the crowd booed even louder.  Than he gave up a double and who would have thought that the crowd could get any louder?

That weekend, I was talking with my son and discovered that he and his dad had booed Gagne as well. I said that I hadn't, and that I thought it was kind of bad that we would boo one of our own at Miller Park.

We were in the car at the time and my son and his friend immediately started explaining, with great exuberance on both their parts, why he got booed.  "He's pitching terrible!"  "He used to be good!"  "We are paying him eight million dollars!"  "If it weren't for him we could afford Sabathia!"  And so on and so forth.

I said that I thought that if people were upset with how he was pitching--and thought that he shouldn't be--then people should be upset with management, not Gagne.  After all, I reasoned, he is doing the best he can and it is not as if he wants to do horrible and have all of Miller Park booing at him.  At this point both their arms shot up in the air (How cute is that?) and they went into great detail about how much he is being paid.  Since he is being paid so much he shouldn't be pitching so badly, they argued.

I asked, then, that if they made the Select team for their little league--because they played really well at try-outs--and then they ended up being terrible, should I boo them?  They said that they weren't being paid eight million dollars.  I said that I thought that Gagne would probably rather make five million and pitch well then make eight million and pitch terribly. (I've since learned that he was paid 10 million, but why split hairs?)

Regardless of how much money he makes, he's still just a human being out there doing the best he can.  What is he supposed to do, go to Brewer management and say, "I really stink. I quit."  Seems to me that he should keep trying.

Finally, I had to pull out my big guns:  "But he has a mother!  How do you think she feels?"

There was more talk on the boys' part about steroids and other questionable behavior and quite frankly, they know way more about baseball than I do.  In the end we had to agree to disagree.  But it was a fun way to spend a car ride.

Earlier this week, before Monday's game, Gagne made a $50,000 donation to the MACC Fund.  It was the largest single gift ever made by an athlete in the MACC fund's 32-year history.  I hope the crowd didn't boo him.

I love that my kids are athletic.  I really do.  Athleticism is one of the things that binds us as a family.  We all play soccer, or at least we all used to.  (Read on to hear more.)  We all took tennis lessons through the park and recreation department this summer and enjoyed them.  This summer we've been biking and swimming; the latest thing we've been doing is having swim races.  We need to give Miranda a head-start but Riley is becoming a really strong swimmer already.

The only problem with having athletic kids these days is all the elite teams that are having tryouts for kids as young as 8-years-old.  Up until this year when he tried baseball, soccer had been the only team sport my son had participated in, so we had managed to avoid select teams.  But this past June, a bunch of his friends were trying out for the select soccer team and there weren't enough kids to field a rec. team for his age group. It was select--or nothing-- if he still wanted to play with his friends, which he did.

Long story short, he didn't make it--but all his friends did.  He was devastated.  So was I--as I had helped coach his team for the past four years and I knew he was good enough to make the team.  I won't bore you with all the details.  His response and coping mechanism was to stop playing soccer completely.  His exact words were: "I was good at soccer, but I'm not anymore."  He has now moved on to football; his first practice was today.  He is also going to try basketball this winter at school and continue with baseball in the spring.

In doing research for an article I wrote a while back, about coaching your child's team, I learned that the number one reason kids give for quitting a sport by age 12 is that "it is not fun anymore."  By pushing kids to get really serious about one sport when they are young, kids are robbed of the opportunity to pursue other sports they may enjoy or be good at.  Burnout is also a factor.  I was just talking to a neighbor today who is a junior in high school.  She is not sure how much longer she will continue to play soccer anymore because she is getting burnt out.  This is a young woman who made varsity soccer as a freshman.

The really silly thing is that if you watch the tryouts, whether it be for soccer or baseball or whatever, I tend to think that other than a few outstanding kids--who obviously have natural talent--most of the other kids are all fairly similar in their skill sets, more or less.  For the vast majority of kids there is no way to know at age 9 or 10 who the superstars are.

As far as my son goes, I have tried to focus on the positives.  I am hoping that a year from now he will love baseball, football or basketball so much that we will be saying, "it is a good thing that you didn't make that select team or you never would have tried football or basketball." 

In the meantime, I am going to enjoy not giving up all our nights and weekends to practices and tournaments.  And I'll enjoy cheering from the sidelines as his dad helps coach his football and baseball teams.