When I was just a young scamp of about eight I got mad at my parents, threatening to run away and to punctuate this idle threat, began packing those essential items I would need for a hard-knocks life on the road.

These included a certain number of toys, a comic book and sandwiches. Strangely, I didn’t consider clothes essential so I suppose that might have been a clue as to how far I was going to follow this plan, but I was fogged over with anger so such trivialities meant little to me.

However, looking back, there were a couple of other things that probably should have clued me into the inevitable fact I wasn’t going very far. Most notably, we didn’t have any more trains going through Lake Wilson, which was a very real aspect to a plan of being a vagabond for life.

The first was the entirely too-calm reaction of my dad, reflected in his words, “Okay, see you tonight.”

The other was mom actually making me the sandwich for my journey. It garnered a grudging “thanks,” but did very little to deter me from my set path. I was still angry, for reasons I will explain momentarily.

Neither one of these things clued my eight-year-old mind into the reality that I would be home by supper. Point of fact: I didn’t make it to the end of the ally. I ran into my childhood buddy Mike and in the short span of about 20 minutes and was sharing my sandwich and gathering the gang from the block for some sort of shenanigans.

Honestly, our parents were sometimes more prison guards charged with keeping us in line more than anything.

So now to the real question. What was I so angry about?

Over the years I was angry with my parents over a number of things, many of which I have forgotten to the ravages of time and just how unimportant these gripes with my perceived unfair treatment really were.

But this time, the argument stemmed from my dad’s refusal to buy me batting gloves, deciding that the competitive world of Little League baseball didn’t really require batting gloves.

Inevitably he was right. They don’t really improve hitting in a child so young, but he was missing the point, or maybe chose to ignore the point altogether.

Being a boy from about eight to 25 means looking as cool as humanly possible. As you progress in age, those things that make you cool change like the word describing the ailment turns from cool to macho. So, batting gloves for me at 21 didn’t mean near as much as they did at eight. Also, I had no money for such things.

The question boiled down to, “How can I be Kirby Puckett if I don’t have batting gloves?”

Dad expertly side-stepped the arguments — very valid arguments I might add — like how am I going to hit homers, how am I going to lay down the perfect bunt and most importantly, how am I going to stare down the pitcher through slitted eyes as I figure out how best to crank his lame attempt at pitching over the fence?

You can’t, not without batting gloves elevating me to just the right point of cool. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I hit one homer in life and that was at practice. The wind was blowing about 140 miles per hour to right field. Still, the coach let me run the bases and I hammed it up appropriately.

Later in life I would come to a truly humbling understanding of life: Dad was and continues to be smarter than me and he knew the truth of two separate, but semi-related facts. I was never going to be Kirby Puckett and things like batting gloves don’t really do much.

His ideas on the subject, ideas I see pretty clearly now, is that a lot of things that kids are using these days for the better game amount to little more thanshow and the idea that if they look like LeBron James or Aaron Rodgers, then their game will be elevated.

I was going to be the next Kirby Puckett except I couldn’t do a lot of the other, little things, that mattered. I certainly didn’t hit for power. Even though my lifetime average was probably close to .300 [this, in every way, was due to my dad and some of the guys he played baseball with, taking the time with us kids], it was comprised of bloop and weak singles from the bottom of the order. In hopes of building my ego, we’ll argue I was down there to make sure we got to the bats at the top of the order, but really, its because hitting wasn’t my strong point.

The moral of this little story is, you can have all the bells and whistles and very much look the part of the next starting centerfielder for the Minnesota Twins, but batting gloves won’t get you there. Work, effort — the little things – will get you better.

It certainly won’t get you past the block you grew up in with only a sandwich and a couple toys. Man, my parents were right far too often.