Manager moms had a major league influence on Betts, Bass and Sabathia

Mookie Betts might be a budding star for the Boston Red Sox, but the center fielder's baseball career began as a simple mom-and-popup operation in Nashville, Tennessee.

Betts' mom, Diana Benedict, coached his first organized baseball team. Sporting a green Ninja Turtle glove and suspenders because the team didn't have a uniform small enough for him, little Mookie came up big and made Mom proud.

"I remember catching my first popup," Betts said. "After I caught it, I looked to my mom, raised the ball up and said, 'Mommy! Mommy! I caught it!'"

Betts is one of several major league players whose baseball roots trace back to the family matriarch. Texas Rangers reliever Anthony Bass' mom, Linda, was his first coach-pitch coach in Trenton, Michigan.

She was part June Cleaver, part Earl Weaver.

"He steps up there for the first time, and he's just ready to pound that ball," she said. "As a mother, you just want to go over and hug him. But he was so professional. He took baseball so seriously, even at that age. I had to make sure I got a strike in there for him."

Mom grooved a pitch right down the middle, and Anthony pounced on it.

"I was trying to take her head off [with line drives]," Bass joked. "My favorite memory of her coaching was hitting a home run off her when I was 7. When I crossed home plate she was smiling from ear to ear.

Betts almost did clean mom's clock with a comebacker. A line drive up the middle against Diana in coach-pitch sent her to the sideline. "It was a rocket. I ducked and it just missed me," Benedict said. "Mookie said, 'Oh, Momma. I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to hit it so hard, Momma!'

Benedict high-fived him, then made a call to the bullpen. "I let one of the other coaches pitch from that point on," she said. "I didn't want Mookie to change his swing because he was afraid of hitting me."

CC Sabathia's mom, Margie Sabathia-Lanier, didn't pitch to her son, but she did catch his bullpen sessions.

"She would put on the full catcher's gear," Sabathia said. "She was a telephone operator for the military [at nearby Travis Air Force Base] and worked the graveyard shift so that she could go to my games."

Sabathia-Lanier also played as a first baseman in a women's league in their hometown of Vallejo, California, and often brought young CC along to her games.

"I was a tomboy," she said. "CC and I would play catch on the concrete next to our apartment. He would set up a pretend mound and I would use a pretend home plate to make sure he was throwing strikes."

When Sabathia was about 12 or 13, his fastball -- "I was about up to 68 [mph] at that point," he said -- finally became too much to handle.

"One day, we set up and I put on the gear and got down into the crouch. He threw that ball at me so hard it felt like it burned my hand," said Sabathia-Lanier. "I caught it, but it hurt! I tossed it back to him and said, 'You know what, dude? I'm done. You're past me. You know how to throw strikes. I cannot catch you anymore.'"

Manager moms like Bass and Benedict may have been a baseball rarity, but both say they didn't encounter much razzing from opposing coaches, umpires or parents once they proved their baseball bona fides.

"When we had our first team meeting, some of the parents asked, 'Who's gonna help you?'" said Benedict, a three-sport athlete who'd grown up playing baseball on the diamond that her grandfather, a sharecropper, had built on the family farm. "But after I started having some skill sessions, they realized that I knew what I was talking about."

Benedict, a safety specialist for the Tennessee Department of Transportation, and Mookie's dad, Willie Betts, fashioned a strike zone out of two cardboard boxes and a broom handle and positioned it above a makeshift home plate. "We worked with Mookie, not only on offense and defense, but we hit balls for 30 or 40 minutes an evening," Benedict said. "Then he'd go back out and hit with his friends."

Linda Bass was already something of a celebrity in Trenton before she became known as the town's resident ace.

"I was the only mom out there on the baseball fields," said Bass. "But people treated me with respect. It also probably helped that I am the town dental hygienist, and just about everybody is a patient. They don't want me to hurt them."

Sabathia-Lanier admits that she never really stopped coaching her son, who is now in his 15th major league season. Never mind that the Yankees veteran has won a World Series ring and the 2007 American League Cy Young Award. Mom still sometimes sees holes in his mechanics.

"When CC was playing with the Indians, we would go outside after every game and have our 'talk,'" said Sabathia-Lanier. "It would be, 'What are you doing when you get 0-and-2?' And, 'Man, you gotta throw that putaway pitch in that situation. You're wasting too many pitches.'"

"At the beginning of this year, I told CC, 'Remember those little talks we used to have when you were in Cleveland? Well, we're gonna start that again.'"

Sabathia welcomes his mom's input. "My mom means everything to me," he said. "She was my catching partner, my ride for everything, my total supporter. I can honestly say I wouldn't be standing here without her. It feels good to know I still have her support."

She texted Sabathia one night earlier this season after he gave up an early homer. "I was like, 'Don't you ever throw that down the pike like that again,'" she said.

Diana Benedict takes a more hands-off approach with Betts, now 22 and in his second season with Boston.

"Very seldom do I try to coach Mookie now," Benedict said. "I usually just try to provide support. But I did have to ask him about that double steal [on the same pitch against the Nationals in April]. I was watching it and went, 'What is he thinking?!?'

"He told me, 'Coach asked me the same thing, Mama. But he told me that they were on the shift and nobody was covering third. So I just looked at it like it was a footrace. I didn't think the pitcher could catch me.'"

Sabathia-Lanier plays catch with her grandkids when she visits them in New Jersey, as she will this weekend.

Sabathia-Lanier says her relationship with CC's older son (Carsten Charles III) is a lot like her relationship with CC when he was a boy. "Little C is only 11, but he's just as competitive as his father and gets so upset when his team loses," Sabathia-Lanier said. "I'll tell him, 'Dude! It means absolutely nothing. Now let's go to Burger King.'"

Linda Bass does more cheering than coaching these days. She was in Texas for the Rangers' home opener, when Anthony, usually a long reliever, was called into emergency duty in the second inning -- "I almost dropped my hot dog," she said -- and tossed five effective innings. But she'll be glued to the TV back in Michigan this Mother's Day, watching her son and cherishing their shared baseball rituals.

"If Anthony did well when I was coaching him, he and his teammates got to go to the Dairy Queen and get sprinkles on their ice cream," Linda said. "Even now, if Anthony has a good night, we tell him, 'Honey, if we were there, we'd take you to the Dairy Queen and get sprinkles.'"

Gordon Edes and Andrew Marchand contributed to this story.