He was my Little League “grandad.”

When we showed up for coach pitch around age 8, Robert Pringle was in charge of that part of Shreveport Little League. He explained to me what to do and how to do it. He did it with patience and compassion.

That changed when we coached against each other years later “fo reals,” when there were little baseball men out there on 90-foot bases doing what little baseball men do. There were games when I wanted to walk to the other dugout and strangle him. But before I could, he’d always hit me in my weak spot. He’d yell to his pitcher or to mine, after a particularly good pitch, “NOW YOU CHUNKIN’!”

It always neutralized me. He knew it would. We had few conversations that one of us didn’t say it, just to make the other one laugh. It’s how all of our conversations ended.

I love a good “Now you chunkin’!”

Robert Pringle passed away in March, just about the time we would have been starting Little League practice. Now the season is over and All Stars looms. I have thought of him often, and would give a lot of money to turn the clock back a few years and have one more night out there with him and his guys and me and mine, him with his sons and me with mine.

Pringle (we called him that because it sounded right, for some reason: he was a last-name guy at the ballyard) loved LSU, the Houston Astros, Shreveport Little League, and Loyola. A standout Flyer among Flyers, he was inducted into the Loyola Hall of Honor five years ago.

I am Protestant, Pringle is Catholic, so our paths didn’t cross in church. But throughout his cancer treatments, he kept showing up for mass. I’m glad that back in the day he kept showing up for what Annie Savoy in the movie Bull Durham called “the Church of Baseball.” It won’t save you, but it can make you understand that you and all those little baseball men are worth saving, that we all bring something to the table, that every little man can make a difference and can have fun doing it even though it’s hard and fun at the same time and, at times, unfair. There seems to be something eternal about baseball…

I can still hear him calling me “Coach Teddy,” which is all he’s ever called me for the past 20 years. He is a memory that makes me smile.

Now you chunkin’.

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