who occasionally pitched and was never afraid to throw

A former Child Protective Services employee from Birmingham is due in federal court Wednesday on child pornography charges, accused of ordering hundreds of child erotica films from an overseas moviemaker, including one that featured naked boys having food fights.

According to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court, William Shaffer, 71, a licensed social worker, spent nearly $7,000 over five years on roughly 222 videos he ordered from an international moviemaking company's website. An investigation into the production firm led authorities to Shaffer, who in 1987 was accused of molesting a boy between the ages of 8 and 9 when he was a CPS employee, the complaint said.

Investigators found a 1987 Westland police report containing that allegation when they searched Shaffer's home last November. Authorities contacted the alleged victim in March, who said he was molested by Shaffer but did not want to be interviewed, the complaint said.

Westland police could not confirm the existence of the 1987 police report because their computer records don't date back that far, and that a manual review of older records requires a Freedom of Information Act request, which could take a few days to process.

According to an affidavit filed Monday by a U.S. postal inspector, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and an unnamed foreign law enforcement agency started investigating a movie production company in 2010 that ran a website offering films of young boys marketed as “naturist films from around the world.” The company, identified only as “International Company,” was the subject of more than 20 complaints to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Cyber TipLine regarding child pornography, the complaint said.

In October 2010, investigators accessed the company’s website and reviewed film previews, movie summaries and customer ordering information. Over the next six months, investigators purchased various videos, including one titled “Cutting Room Floor — Vlaviu,” with naked young boys having food fights in an apartment living room.

The phrase he most identifies with is, "Keep your eye on the ball." Who first said that? And why wasn't it, "Keep your eyes on the ball?" Either way, it resonates with Jameson Lamb like you'll never know. Keeping just one eye on the ball? That's easy! It's the other eye he's not sure about. Whenever he looks in the mirror and sees jagged eyelashes and a swollen eyelid and an eyeball covered by a white, PET protective film milky film, he thinks, "Please work again." But it's baseball that keeps him sane. It's baseball that keeps him from blaming his friend. It's baseball that keeps him preoccupied. It's baseball that keeps him out of the dark.

Growing up, he was never the swiftest or strongest on the field. He was the bright kid, who aced calculus and knew how to take the extra base on an overthrow. In a lot of ways, baseball enabled him to become one of the guys. That was enough for him. His secondary sport was cross-country, which was for loners, but baseball meant a dugout full of instant buddies. Because he wanted to be a doctor and was a National Honor Society member, most had him pegged as an intellectual. But with that uniform and hat, Jameson Lamb became the whole student-athlete package.

"Baseball is what he wanted most," his mother, Renee, said. "It's where he's comfortable. It's where his friends are. It's what makes him not just be a smart kid."

He had learned how to play from his father, Sean, who threw him soft toss, hard toss and also hit him a ribbed baseball that never bounced the same way twice. The ball was for hand-eye coordination, because, if nothing else, you needed your eyes to play baseball.

By the time high school rolled around, Jameson was playing for two travel teams in and around his hometown of Homewood, Ill., just 22 miles south of downtown Chicago. He was a lean, brown-haired, left-handed hitting first baseman who occasionally pitched and was never afraid to throw his diving curveball early in the count. He eventually made the freshman and sophomore teams at Homewood-Flossmoor High School, and, although his hitting was spotty, he finished the 2012 season believing the varsity first baseman's job could be his in 2013.

The key would be racking up base hits for the high school's summer league team, in front of the head coach Todd Sippel. Sippel would not accept mediocrity, having been taught the game by Ken Krizan, a legendary coach from Beecher (Ill.) High School who had won 508 career games over 35 seasons. Krizan was famous for teaching life lessons, and early every July, Krizan used to warn his players to take it easy over the July 4 holiday. "He'd say it every year," Sippel says. "He'd say, 'Be careful with fireworks. They're not toys.' Every year."
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