Project

49 Photographs in

Tim Porter

Photo #1: Hanging Hasselhoff

A card of hack actor and Baywatch hunk David Hasselhoff hangs in at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, an artists in residence community.

I love the faces of these kids on their first day of Little League. I shot this for a local magazine and wrote the long copy block (below) to go with it. I do this every month. Here are some photos from previous months:

Slip Sliding Away

Resplendent in the western sun

Thanks for looking -- and reading.

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The Boys of Spring

By Tim Porter

“This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.” – Bull Durham

Unlike most other sports, baseball is a game learned young. A friend might say at age 30 or 40 or 50 that he’s going to take up golf or scuba diving or even archery. But not baseball. Never baseball. Baseball is not an adult game; it’s played in a grassy Never-Never Land with foul lines, face masks and hot dog stands. As the legendary Brooklyn Dodger catcher Roy Campanella said, “You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.”

These days, with sandlots and neighborhood pick-up games only a memory of another generation, most little boys – and girls – learn baseball in organized leagues. They play on teams like the Owls, a Rookie level team in the Mill Valley Little League, looking the part of diminutive major leaguers whose true age is betrayed by freshness of their faces and the relative size of their hats.

The Mill Valley Little League has 51 teams and 700 players. After the league’s opening day parade this year, the Owls and the other teams waited patiently through the speeches of adults, gloves in hand, eager to play some ball. But it was not to be that day. They learned their first lesson of baseball: Sometimes it rains.