Alright, so let me tell you about my adventure with the so-called “Freeman baseball schedule.” It all started a few months back. My kid, Jake, he suddenly got super into baseball. Like, obsessed. So, of course, we signed him up for the local league. And then came the fun part: figuring out the game schedule.
Everyone I talked to, other parents, even the guy at the snack shack, they all kept saying, “Oh, just check the Freeman schedule.” Sounded pretty official, right? Freeman schedule. I figured it was some app or a fancy website. Boy, was I in for a surprise.
My Hunt Begins
So, my first move, naturally, was to go online. I searched the league’s website, which looked like it hadn’t been updated since 2012. Found a page that said “Schedules,” clicked it, and got a “Page Not Found.” Classic. Okay, plan B. I started asking around more directly. “Where exactly IS this Freeman schedule?” I’d ask. Got a bunch of vague answers. “Oh, usually Dave emails it out.” “I think Susan posts it on the community center bulletin board.” “Someone usually has a printout at the first practice.” It felt like I was looking for a mythical creature.
I spent a good couple of days on this. I emailed the league contact, no reply. I even drove down to the community center, squinting at faded flyers on the bulletin board. Nothing that screamed “Freeman Baseball Schedule.” I was starting to think this whole thing was a prank on the new baseball parents.
The “Discovery”
Then, finally, another parent, bless her soul, took pity on me. She said, “Oh honey, let me forward you the Freeman.” And a few minutes later, an email landed in my inbox. The subject? “FW: FW: FW: BASEBALL STUFF.” The attachment? A Word document. Not a PDF, a .doc file. My tech senses were already tingling.
I opened it. And just… wow. It was a document, alright. It looked like someone had typed it on an old typewriter, then maybe photocopied it a few times, then scanned it, and then tried to edit it in Word without really knowing how Word works. Everything was formatted with spaces. You know, instead of tabs or tables. Just endless spaces to line things up, badly.
- Dates were all over the place.
- Team names were sometimes abbreviated, sometimes not.
- Field numbers were occasionally just “the back field.”
- And the times! Some games were “6:00 PM,” others were “around 6:15 PM.” How do you schedule your life around “around 6:15 PM”?
Trying to Make Sense of It
I spent a solid hour just trying to decipher our team’s games. I had to cross-reference with the team roster I got separately to even be sure which “Blue Jays” was our “Blue Jays” because, apparently, there were three of them in different age groups, and the schedule didn’t always specify.
Then I found out the story. “Freeman” wasn’t a system. It was Mr. Freeman. An actual guy. A lovely old fella, apparently, who had volunteered and meticulously put together the town’s baseball schedule by hand, on paper, for like, 30 or 40 years. He’d just retired last season. What I was looking at was someone’s attempt to digitize Mr. Freeman’s legendary, but very analog, system. They clearly just typed up his notes, quirks and all.
It was kind of endearing, in a way. But also, super frustrating. I ended up re-typing our team’s portion of the schedule into a simple, clean spreadsheet. I even color-coded it. I know, I know, a bit much, but I needed order!
This whole experience reminded me of my first job out of college. We had this ancient inventory system. It was all paper logs and carbon copies. Everyone complained. But the warehouse manager, old Sal, he knew that system like the back of his hand. He could find anything in minutes. When Sal retired, they brought in this fancy new digital system. Cost a fortune. And for the first six months? Chaos. Absolute chaos. Nobody could find anything. Sometimes the old ways, as clunky as they are, have their own weird logic that works, at least for the people who grew up with them.
So, the Freeman baseball schedule. It was a journey. We survived the season, mostly thanks to a group chat with other parents for last-minute clarifications. “Is the game actually at 5:30 or 6:00 today?” became a common text. It wasn’t efficient, but hey, we got our baseball in. And I guess I got a story out of it, too.
