Take Me Out Of The Ballgame..

MLB "spring training" is underway. A fitting time for me to reminisce about my own memories of the sport, and my utter ineptness thereof.

Another blogger I visit -- Hale McKay -- sometime back posted some jokes about baseball. The very first one resonated immediately: about how little Billy raced home and told his mom that he'd helped score the winning run in the ballgame that afternoon. And how had he done that, she asked?

"I dropped the ball". DOH!

Sounds like me.

Baseball was never my sport. As a kid that got signed up for Little League, I didn't last one season of it. Among other inabilities (eye-hand coordination, ball-bat coordination, throw-aim coordination, flyball-glove coordination), I had this inexplicable fear of a baseball, zeroing right in on my head.

A couple of times of which, it did.

In elementary/jr high/high school softball, I gradually rounded into a manageably inept player who learned to improve eye-hand, bat-ball and flyball-glove coordination. The throw-aim coordination wasn't following along at the same pace, but showed some sign of promise that I could deliver the ball to within feet of the target.

The fear of the ball coming at the head remained. Which I can't explain, since hitting me in the head -- as three concussions have proven -- doesn't amount to much. Common sense doesn't manage to penetrate there at times either, but I digress.

Anyway, the Billy story brought back an old softball memory, one that I can now laugh about, since the other party to the story has, I am comfortably certain, no idea where I am anymore.

Into adulthood, I found myself getting roped into playing rec-league slow-pitch softball. Eh. I'd finally managed to find enough assorted levels of coordination to manage this, and found a fielding position that thoroughly fit me: right field. It was an easy choice, since no one else on the team wanted it ("too boring", I was told). But for me, it was perfect: a grounder that got past the infield was no problem; a fly ball, if hit deep enough, gave me time enough to work out the coordinates, windage, elevation, projected rate of drift, deceleration and drop, for me to make a half-dozen adjustments to same, and make a catch, while the crowd took bets on whether I would or not.

My teammates told me that the odds were running 8-5 against. Wiseasses.

One thing I had developed over the years -- and can't explain why -- was a cannon-arm for throwing the ball back in. But the throw-aim coordination was a tad bit dubious as yet.

At a corporate job during the latter 1980s, I was part of a group that challenged a mixed team of sheriff's deputies from our local county, to a slow-pitch softball game. On the night of the big event, the two teams appeared to be pretty evenly-matched, and the score went to and fro.

Up to then, I'd had a good night: not one ball that left the infield had done so to right field. I was pretty complacent, having had a good 3-for-4 at the plate, with 3 runs scored and 3 RBI. Then, late in the 6th inning, the deputies managed to tie us up, and with two outs, the hitter punched a ball into, until then, virgin right field.

Oh sh**.

While trying to compute the longitude and latitude of the inbounder, I recognized that it was going to drop in front of me for a base hit; so did the baserunner, who poured on the coals in a bid for a double. When I got to the ball, he was about 2/3s of the way to second base; I came up quickly and fired a rocket from about 60 feet away to the second baseman.

With that cannon-arm of mine, I threw the baserunner out. Literally. With a badly-timed revisitation of that dubious throw-aim coordination of mine, I put the ball squarely behind the baserunner's right ear, dumping him to the dirt short of second base. Fell like a sack of wet compost, he did.

For the next few minutes, the very shaky, white-faced baserunner kept insisting that one finger was three. He was helped off, and a pinch runner substituted for him. One that went onto score the winning run.

All because I threw the wrong kind of "out".

Yep...me and Billy got something in common. We won a game. For the opposing team.

Come July, it'll have been 21 years since that "argument for Alzheimers" game. I don't play softball any more. And I don't worry about being pulled over by that particular deputy, one dark and sinister night in a rural part of the county any more. I trust to the rocket I delivered, to have provided him just enough memory lapse ;-)