Grandpa Teaching Me To Throw In The Front Yard

The Grandpa and Grandson Shirt That Sounds Like Leather and Wet Grass on a Saturday Morning

Every grandpa and grandson shirt tells a story, but this one sounds like a baseball hitting leather in a front yard on a Saturday morning when the grass is still wet. The Teaching You to Throw in the Front Yard Tee from the Little Hands Collection is that sound pressed into cotton, drawn in crayon by the kid who threw the ball, from the angle of someone who thinks his fastball is real and his grandpa is the luckiest catcher in the world.

Look at the drawing. Grandpa is on the left, squatting low in a navy blue shirt and khaki shorts, glove out, knees bent at an angle that would make a doctor flinch. The kid is on the right in a red shirt and gray shorts, tongue out, arm back, about to let one fly. A brown glove on his left hand that still swallows his fingers. The baseball is in the air between them, white with red stitches, motion lines trailing behind it. And between them, the house. Their house. White walls, gray roof, red front door, two blue windows, green bushes on each side. The front yard runs underneath everything in thick green crayon strokes, and the text below alternates dark blue and red because that is how a five-year-old thinks a baseball should be colored.

The throw goes about fourteen feet. It takes two bounces to reach me.

I say nothing about the bounces. I scoop it out of the grass and toss it back soft and straight into the pocket of a glove that is too big for his hand but will not be by July. He catches it and his whole body reacts. Shoulders come up, face goes wide, glove held high to show me the ball is still in it. I act like he fielded a line drive in the bottom of the ninth. “Good hands,” I tell him, which is what my father told me in a different front yard forty-seven years ago, which is what his father told him in a yard I have never seen in a town I have only visited once.

What Is a Good Gift for a Grandson to Give to Their Grandpa?

A good gift for a grandson to give his grandpa is something that remembers Saturday mornings in the front yard. Not the scoreboard version. The real one. The version where the throw bounces twice and grandpa scoops it like it was right on target and throws it back soft enough to land in a glove that still swallows a five-year-old’s hand. This tee is that Saturday morning. A child drew it in crayon with the house between the gloves and the grass under their feet and the ball suspended in the air between them, and every detail is wrong in ways that are more true than any photograph.

I squat because he is three feet tall and the strike zone on a three-foot person is approximately the size of a shoebox. My knees have opinions about this arrangement. I overrule them. I will squat in this grass for as long as there is a small person on the other side of this yard who wants to throw me a baseball, and when my knees finally win the argument I will bring a lawn chair and hold the glove at the same height and he will never know the difference because the sound will be exactly the same.

My Father Threw From This Same Distance

Different yard. Same distance. He squatted the same way I do now, left knee forward, glove low. I remember his glove was dark brown and the pocket was deep from years of use and the ball disappeared into it every time, which made me believe I threw harder than I actually did. He never corrected my grip in front of anyone. He waited until we were alone and then he put his hand over mine on the seams and turned it a quarter inch and said, “Try it like that.” A quarter inch. That was the whole lesson. The rest was reps and a front yard and a man who had nowhere else he wanted to be on a Saturday morning.

I played catch with my kids in our yard for years. Different house, same distance, same squat. I said “good hands” the way my father said it, without thinking about where I learned those words, until one afternoon my daughter threw a slider that tailed hard into my glove and I heard myself say it and I heard him. Right there in my own front yard, decades later. I stood up and my knees were stiff and my eyes were wet and my daughter asked if I was okay and I said the grass was bothering me, which was not true, and she knew it, and she threw another one anyway.

Now my grandson stands where I stood. His throw bounces. His glove is too big. His tongue sticks out when he concentrates. He looks nothing like me and exactly like every kid who has ever stood in a front yard with a ball that feels too big for his hand, learning from a man who learned it the same way in a different yard from a man whose front yard he has never seen. The distance between the gloves is fourteen feet today. By next summer it will be eighteen. By the summer after that he will throw it straight and I will not have to scoop it and the sound will change, sharper, and we will both hear it and know what it means.

After the gloves come off and his arm is tired in the way a five-year-old’s arm gets tired, which lasts about four minutes, he wants food. The Saturday morning donut run picks up where the yard leaves off, because a morning with grandpa has never been about one thing.

By noon he is done. The yard and the donuts and the second round of throwing that nobody planned but everyone saw coming have taken everything out of him. He falls asleep on the couch or draped across my wife with his head on her chest and his glove still on his hand because he refused to take it off. That version of the afternoon, the quiet one where the throwing finally catches up with him, has its own shirt in this collection, and my wife says the weight of a sleeping five-year-old who still smells like grass is the best thing she has ever felt.

$39.99. Free shipping. The glove cost more. The morning cost nothing, and I will never find a way to tell anyone what it is worth to squat in this grass and hear my father’s voice come out of my mouth without meaning to.

Printed on a Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed heavyweight tee with water-based DTG ink — sizing and care details here.