When the weather heats up, you know it’s baseball season.

And when summer gets here, baseball season heats up even more.

Youth baseball season is in full swing across Richmond County, and with the end of the spring high school season, I’ve been able to get out to some of the youth games in the area.

Going to youth baseball games always brings back fond memories for me, as it takes me back 35 years to my own roots in baseball.

Back in the day, you started at about age 8, and T-ball was where you started. I can remember my first attempts to swing the bat.

In those early days, I often connected with the tee m ore than I did with the ball.

As the shortest person on the Damascus Steelheads — somewhere around four feet tall, I’m thinking — the tee typically had to be adjusted down quite a bit for my plate appearances.

But little by little, I learned — just as the littlest ballplayers these days do.

Nowadays, it seems that either coach-pitch or pitching-machine is the first level of baseball.

It’s probably better for young players to face live pitching as early as possible, since that’s what they’ll see as they progress through the ranks.

Covering the local games, I see the full range of emotions: The joy of hitting a home run — and the agony of giving one up.

It always takes me back to a hot summer day in 1976 — a playoff game, in the 9-10 Little League Division.

I’d been slated to pitch this game for weeks, and had been looking forward to it eagerly. My coach was not too happy when I told him I’d be gone two weeks over the Fourth of July holiday for a trip with my dad to visit my grandfather in Alaska.

I was able to get out of the doghouse by promising to get my throwing in.

That turned out to be hard to do, since we spent much of the vacation with my grandfather on his salmon fishing boat.

The only throwing I got to do was tossing undersized fish back into the clear Alaskan waters.

But one day, we anchored near some islands in the Panhandle, and my dad and I rowed to shore in a dinghy.

Fashioning a makeshift home plate out of clamshells, I spent an hour working on my pitching.

The throwing session was cut short by the appearance of a family of grizzly bears at the edge of the beach.

When I got home, it was game time. I didn’t sleep much the night before, probably because I was excited, but probably more because I stayed up late listening to a baseball game on the radio.

My warm-ups for the game went fine, I thought. We went through the pre-game ceremonies, and I took the mound.

I hiked up my belt, rubbed up the ball, shook off a sign from my catcher, got one I liked, wound and dealed.

“TINK!” went the aluminum bat as a long drive sailed off into the distance.

Leadoff home run.

It wasn’t my day, as it turned out. I gave up six runs on nine hits as the opposing team batted around.

Without recording an out, I was relieved to see the coach striding toward the mound. I couldn’t get rid of the ball fast enough as I was sent to left field and my friend Alan Bloomfield relieved me.

Alan held the line, and we rallied, but we came up short. The top seed in our bracket, we were one-and-done.

And I felt like it was my fault.

I sulked in the dugout for awhile after the game, until the coach came, put his arm around me, and gave me some variation of a “The sun will come up tomorrow” speech recycled countless times over the years.

It’s a cliched speech. But it’s true.

Sports, especially youth sports, aren’t life or death. They’re a game, and they can be one of the earliest teachers of one of life’s hardest lessons: Sometimes, you give 110 percent, spill your bucket, and leave it all on the field, and it’s not good enough.

Over the next few weeks, the scene will play itself out over and over again on the fields of dreams of Richmond County. Some teams will win; others will lose.

But the lessons will be the same: Give your best, play hard, be true to yourself, and don’t give up.

Contact sports editor David Vantress at 997-3111, or via email at dvantress@yourdailyjournal.com.