We trailed 4-3 with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the sixth and final inning. Standing in the coach’s box alongside the first base line, I glanced at my scorecard to find, regrettably, that Aaron was our next batter. “Shit,” I muttered to myself. “Anyone but Aaron.”

This past summer was my third year of coaching youth baseball. Usually, the scores of the games were inconsequential, these being eight- to ten-year-olds, but our team was 0-11 and this was our last game. For the kids’ sake, we needed to win once. A 1-11 season spells dignity; the tacit recognition that victory is possible even if infrequent. Not so with 0-12, a Little League record so odious it’s liable to haunt a player through their teens and into middle age when, invariably, his own children will be pressured into sports to atone for their parent’s past failings.

But all hopes of forestalling such a traumatic season rested on the bat of our worst player, Aaron, the single most sadistic nine-year-old in the history of Minneapolis’ little leagues. The boy was an unendurably rambunctious monster. He pulled teammates’ hair, destroyed equipment and yelled insults at other players while they batted, but it was his unwillingness to throw a baseball that galled me most. He preferred to dropkick the ball and shout “Goal!” at the top of his lungs instead. This happened more than a few times in every game, which might have been why this team had yet to earn a victory.

At the plate, Aaron seldom swung the bat. Having no faith in his ability to come through in the clutch in our last chance for a win, I looked toward our bench to see if he was ready to hit and get it over with. Predictably, Aaron was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Aaron?” I yelled to the bench, but the other coaches were already searching for him. “Not again,” I thought. “Tell me he isn’t crawling under the bleachers. Or throwing other kid’s gloves in the dumpster behind the parking lot. Or digging a — ” This thought was abruptly interrupted by a shrill chorus of screams sounding from the opposite end of the field, over which I heard a coach yell, “Aaron, get down from there!” To the crowd’s collective horror, Aaron had scaled the backstop and was hurling rocks at the opposing team’s bench and fan section as he howled “Goooooo Cubs!” with pernicious glee. He had carefully prepared for his onslaught, filling his pockets to their brims with stones. “Rockies suck!” he shrieked, launching a rock at the opposing coach who struggled to shield himself behind his plastic clipboard.

Having witnessed several similarly surreal Aaron outbursts over the previous eleven games, my resolve to intercede was torpid. My only reaction was annoyance at the fact that Aaron, who could suddenly throw rocks with dangerous velocity while clinging to a chain link fence, had never once been willing to throw a baseball in a game.

Amidst barking dogs, screeching children and mortified parents ducking under lawn chairs to avoid the barrage of stones, I spotted Aaron’s father. Vulgarly clad in a Hawaiian shirt, he stood and attentively videotaped his devilish son with the slightest hint of a smile on his lips, as if this incident were as normal an event at a Little League game as a skinned knee.

Since I believe in giving nine-year-olds the benefit of the doubt, I must place all blame for Aaron’s misbehavior on his father. Months earlier, before the season’s opening game, he introduced himself to our coaching staff with the line: “Hello, I’m Aaron’s father. You can go ahead and call me Greg, though. I’m a lawyer.” He was the type of man who justifies excessive intervention into his son’s affairs with the inflated notion of being a good father. He was anything but.

During the “kids against parents” exhibition softball game, he had tried his hardest to win, sliding into home plate and taking out the legs of his own son. Before regular games, as I made the batting order and applied positions, he would stand over my shoulder and ask where I planned to bat Aaron, making sure to note that his son was primed for a big game and that many of the other players were looking “lackluster” in warm-ups. “I’m sorry, Greg, but I’ve already told you. I’m batting him last and putting him at catcher every inning so long as he keeps tipping over the water jug during games,” I said on one occasion. “I know what you’re getting at,” he replied as he removed his sunglasses and looked at me in the eye with solemnity. “I’m the boy’s father and I know better than anyone how he can be a real shovelful sometimes. But, as I tell my wife, I like to think that that’s just Aaron being Aaron. And you know what? I wouldn’t change Aaron for the world.”

During games, Aaron’s father acted like a monarchal coach for both teams, yelling at players to shift their positions or to look alive. He also yelled at the umpire from time to time, an absurdity in a league where balls and strikes weren’t kept.