With the baseball season about to open, we have two items to contemplate about the most perfect sport.
Why can’t Forest Park mount a girls’ softball league? We reported last week that the Little League organization in town has just nixed its girls’ softball program for the fourth consecutive year. League officials want girls softball but the numbers are soft and getting softer. There are a range of explanations from the rise of fast-pitch to the tug of soccer.
Girls in town play co-ed T-ball at a young age but don’t make the natural transition to softball as they move through grade school. The handful of girls who want to play the sport get diverted to successful programs in River Forest and Oak Park.
This week we also carry the obit for a former president of the Forest Park Little League, Patrick Falbo, who worked as a coach and league official for more than 25 years. That’s a lot of ground balls going through a lot of legs.
We appreciate the comments of one of Mr. Falbo’s former players: “He was not passionate about winning. His passion was to teach us how to be better baseball players, and, in turn, we learned how to be better people.”
Now that is an epitaph.
