Martha Payne

Put Him In, Coach!: a Mother's All-star Memoir Martha Payne

Four-year-old Sam Payne can knock the baseball out of the park. That "the park" is only the back yard of his suburban home makes little difference to his mother, Martha Payne, who understands baseball a lot better than she understands parenting. She yearns to make her son a star on the Little League field, where promising young players are rewarded with a spot on the All-Star team. Fueled by endless ambition but only a pinch of maternal instinct, Payne helps her son navigate through the thrilling but often heartless world of Little League baseball. While revealing a host of parental neuroses and coaching excesses, Put Him In, Coach! delves into the inscrutable bond between mother and son-a bond sometimes forged in unlikely places. As Sam progresses from tee-ball through years of strikeouts and wild pitches and up to the brink of adolescence, he and his mother discover as much about each other as they do about the perils of the game. Most importantly, Payne learns that in raising a son, sometimes less is more-even if your kid does have a shot at becoming the next Babe Ruth.