Softball: Longish (A Little more Sass on the Topic de Jour)
Raymond Weschler
Dear People,
Let me be blunt: There were a few minutes in the 6th inning of last week’s match when my own team was feeling so demoralized by its 16-5 deficit to Jim McGuire’s that I considered stripping off my skivvies and fleeing stone cold naked into the trees and then beyond. Yeah, I think we all felt doomed from the get-go, and it started even before the first pitch when my large blue water bottle fell smack onto the delicate marbling tissues between the calcaneus and navicular bones of my favorite right foot. Of course I’m a generally stoic and uber-manly athlete, and so you may not have noticed my silent whimpering as the impact zone slowly swelled into a giant mauve ouchie from my phalanges to my virgin heel (for a tender point of reference, see D.K. Slater’s masterful new history, The Phalanges to Virgin Heal: Coleridge, Shelley and the Great Anatomical Poets of Early Industrial Florida, 1945-1969, which, to be clear, is not to be confused with Robert Frost’s heartbreaking memoir, The Phalanges of Virgin Hill: My Contemplative Walks on the Appalachian Trail).
To be sure, the 6th inning was our trial in the nadir, for not only was I still suffering in stout and courageous quietude, but it was then and there that we lost Amable’s athletic dominance to a pulled right calf, and if that weren’t enough, it was also when Kira’s 34 years of muscle memory got the best of her Covidian etiquette with a ghastly attempted tag-out of Bobby Weinapple at 2nd. Yeah, it was a viral and profoundly human drama, but the bottom line is that after intensive negotiations with Professor McGuire, it was agreed that Kira would not be voted off the island though good ’ol Appleboy would need to quarantine for the next 30 months. In any case, we still clung to our minimum quorum with just a patina of despair-crushing moxie.
As patinas go, it was just enough. Over the next two innings, we methodically clawed our way back under Erica’s multiple RBI singles and a critical 8th-inning walk that loaded the bases for filial-unit Porter’s equity-creating double. At the end of the 8th we were suddenly tied up, and that’s where we stayed until just one out to go in the bottom of the 11th. The 11th!
Then, with the dispositive runner at 2nd, the legendary Cameron Klotz blasted a blistering bullet to right that gave us the glorious 22-21 triumph that we had always craved, and even better, that magnificent denouement arrived just three minutes after the Klotzmeister had learned that his beloved S.O. Cristi had arrived in Miami, on her way from Medellin, Columbia to world-famous Berkeley! Yes, my friends, there is clearly something deep in the human bosom that will always synergize love, pluck and sport, and perhaps Captain McLoser will play closer attention to its implications the next time he gets to lead.
The point is that I, too believe that principled originalism is the guiding legal philosophy upon which to hitch our national destiny, for no other doctrine is so strictly apolitical in its approach to the law. Oh sure, its most dedicated adherents all conclude that when the originally understood meaning of the great US Constitution is applied to such varied issues as abortion, gay marriage and assisted suicide as well as the basic civil liberties of immigrants, refugees, prisoners, women, ethnic minorities and workers, that wondrous 18th century document produces 21st-century rulings that just happens to titillate the far right wing of our American peepage.
Of course history is replete with coincidence, and the real point is that irrespective of your generic libtards’ insistence on imaginary ‘rights,’ originalist jurists will always let the political branches make policy as it was intended in the constitutional framework (except perhaps when they won’t, as seen in the striking down of legislation addressing such varied issues as guns, the ACA, treaty enactment, the entire regulatory state, and ya know, for whatever it’s worth, campaign finance, political corruption and 31 flavors of voter suppression). Regardless, I think we can all come full circle and agree in the grand Scalian tradition that if a person wants to engage in any constitutionally uncodified indulgence, from playing softball to choking the chicken, it’s for the good people of the individual states to decide if it’s permissible. And therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond