Lake Monsters Baseball schedule

Burlington — Zander Clark eats, sleeps and breathes sports. Believe it. He owns a T-shirt that says as much.

The eating and breathing become apparent with the 8-year-old’s schedule. He pitched and played second base on a recreational youth baseball team this spring. He loves basketball, especially the shot-blocking part of it. He’s getting a taste of youth football. He’s received his youth hunter certification.

But don’t think the sleeping part doesn’t have its benefits. It’s the reason why Clark spent Friday night at Centennial Field, attending the Vermont Lake Monsters’ New York-Penn League baseball game with the Connecticut Tigers. He basically did so as a member of the squad.

During a Cub Scout sleepover at Centennial earlier in the summer, Clark — an energetic 8-year-old from West Fairlee — answered a three-question survey from the team as it sought candidates for its second Little Lake Monsters Community All-Stars promotion. Team officials were sufficiently impressed with Clark’s answers — about sportsmanship, living a healthy lifestyle and contributing to his community — that he drew one of nine invitations for Friday’s event out of more than 100 responses.

Clark’s night — altered somewhat by showers — included meandering through much taller athletes, taking cuts in the batting cage, pitching to one of the Lake Monster players, hanging out with a friend, inspecting his own baseball card, hovering around his mom and hugging his dad. He also trotted down to the Vermont dugout and spent the second inning with his bigger teammates, the guys he might want to become someday.

“This year, watching our team, a lot of the boys struggled with the part of not doing well or not pitching a good game or coming together as a team, ” Fabienne Stearns, Clark’s mother, said last week, looking ahead to the night in Burlington. “I’m hoping that he picks up on a little on that if you strike out 15 times or don’t pitch a great game, keep going.”

Getting paid? That was just one part of the fun.

A staff cranium-crunching session brought the Little Lake Monsters Community All-Stars to life last year.

“One day, we were brainstorming and wanted to come up with an idea that could win Minor League Baseball’s Golden Bobblehead Award for the best promotion, ” Nate Cloutier, the Lake Monsters’ 14th-year executive sales and marketing said last week. “We wanted to come up with something that would give us some merit in that category, so we started thinking about what you’d want if you were a little kid, what we take for granted to put a smile on kids’ faces and put the pieces together how they would like to be treated as a professional for the day.