CRANFORD, NJ — Local volunteer little league coach Doug Merriweather, 44, is now three weeks into what will be his sixth consecutive season being loudly, repeatedly, and unrelentingly called a fucking idiot by Frank Cusimano, 61, the grandfather of a nine-year-old outfielder named Braylon.
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Merriweather, a mild-mannered accountant who volunteers his Tuesday and Thursday evenings and every Saturday morning from March through July to coach a team of children he is not related to, in exchange for no compensation, said Wednesday that he has, at this point, “made his peace” with the situation.
“Frank’s just a fan,” Merriweather said, standing in the parking lot of Cranford’s Municipal Field. “He cares. It’s a beautiful thing, honestly.”
Frank, from the third-base bleachers, had at that moment been informed by a bystander that Merriweather was doing an interview. He immediately cupped his hands around his mouth.
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“HE’S A FUCKING IDIOT!” he shouted, gesturing at the reporter. “WRITE THAT DOWN. F-U-C-K-I-N-G. THAT’S HOW YOU SPELL IT!”
Merriweather waved cheerfully in Frank’s direction.
“See,” he said. “He’s engaged.”
Frank Cusimano has been attending every single game, practice, and scrimmage of his grandson’s little league career since Braylon was six. He arrives forty minutes early. He brings a folding chair. He brings a small cooler. He does not speak to any other parent. He speaks only to Doug Merriweather, and he speaks only in the form of criticism, and the criticism is delivered at a volume that has, sources confirmed, twice been the subject of complaints filed with the Cranford Parks & Recreation Department.
Both complaints were dismissed.
“Frank has a First Amendment right to yell at Doug,” said one Rec Department official. “The kids aren’t scared. The kids love Frank. Doug seems fine. I have bigger problems. Please stop calling me.”
The kids, sources confirmed, do love Frank. Frank keeps a bag of Airheads under his folding chair. Frank distributes them at the end of every game. Frank has learned every child’s name and preferred Airhead flavor. He calls each of them champ. He calls Doug Merriweather nothing except fucking idiot, and, on rare occasions, when the mood is unusually foul, fucking dipshit.
Braylon, Frank’s grandson, has, over the course of six seasons, never once acknowledged the shouting.
“I don’t really hear it anymore,” Braylon said, chewing a green apple Airhead. “That’s just how Grandpa is. He does it at soccer too.”
Braylon plays soccer, sources confirmed, for a different volunteer coach. Frank calls him a fucking idiot as well.
Merriweather, for his part, has developed what he described as “a real strategy” for absorbing Frank’s feedback. He waits until the ride home. He replays each shouted comment in his head. He asks himself whether, in each specific case, Frank might have had a point.
“About 30% of the time,” Merriweather said, “he does.”
He was asked to give an example.
“Two weeks ago,” he said, “we had a runner on second, one out, and I sent Braylon home on a shallow fly. Frank called me a fucking idiot from the moment the ball was hit until Braylon was tagged out at the plate. In retrospect, that was probably the wrong call. Frank was, in that specific instance, correct.”
He paused.
“But he was also very loud about it,” he added.
Merriweather’s wife, Patricia, has, over the course of six seasons, gently suggested that her husband simply stop coaching.
“He doesn’t have to do this,” she said Thursday. “He was an English major. He hates baseball. He’s doing this for the kids. And every Tuesday he comes home and he sits on the back porch and he stares at the sky for a while before he can talk. I ask him if he’s okay. He says he’s fine. He says Frank is just a fan. I do not know what to do.”
Merriweather has told her, repeatedly, that he plans to coach through Braylon’s twelfth birthday.
Braylon is currently nine.
That is, Patricia noted, three more seasons.
“Frank will be sixty-four,” she said quietly. “Doug will be forty-seven. I do not know what he will look like at forty-seven.”
Frank, when asked whether he had ever considered thanking Doug for volunteering his time, snorted.
“For what,” he said. “For sending my grandson home on a shallow fly? For batting him seventh when he’s clearly a five-hole guy? For running practice like a fucking accountant?“
He paused.
“He’s a fucking idiot,” he added.
He then reached into his cooler, pulled out a Coors Light, cracked it open, and yelled the same phrase across the field again, this time in Doug’s direction, unprompted.
Doug waved.
At press time, Doug Merriweather was standing quietly in the third-base coach’s box, hands on his knees, watching Braylon at the plate. Frank Cusimano was on his fourth Coors Light. The game was tied in the bottom of the fifth. Doug was, by his own count, three weeks into the six-season plan.
He had, sources confirmed, another thirteen weeks to go this season alone.
He was, sources also confirmed, going to see it through.