Softball: The Nature of Things, Promising and Perilous
raymond...@gmail.com
Dear People,
On one of those mesmerizing East Bay days in which the broad panoply of dialectical opposites transmogrified ceaselessly before our very eyes, my team battled Stefano’s with conviction, aplomb, and a certain Hegelian embrace of events as they unfolded. Indeed, the day itself began as a frosty and dreary morn,’ but within an hour of the opening pitch, it had turned blue and warm and glorious with just a hint of communal despair still lingering in the ether. Even more compelling, several players amongst us displayed that same ability to break the stale contradictions of their own material trajectories, and perhaps no one more dramatically than the great Miles McCammon, who, in playing softball for only the third time in his young and innocent life, displayed the entire ghastly gamut of the human athletic experience.
The fact is that Miles has not yet mastered the basic rules of the game, and with all due respect, this isn’t hard to demonstrate. Indeed, when he found himself at 1st in the top of the 3rd with bases loaded to the gills, the excitement of Aaron’s bouncing line drive to deep center right apparently confused our callow hero to no end, for about halfway into his frantic run to 2nd, he suddenly stopped, looked around in panic, and then for no logical reason whatsoever, darted back to 1st, thus turning a glorious 2-out 2-RBI single into a rally-destroying train wreck that Marx himself would’ve attributed to the overworked conditions of the proletariat brain.
And yet. The Milester soon turned it all around, including with a sublime play at home in which a desperate 2-out 4th-inning throw got by his mis-timed scoop, but in the second of writhing that followed, he was able to grab the wayward orb, then fall flat on his ass, and then still beat Stefano to the plate with his perfectly outstretched and ball-clamping hand. It was, to be sure, a moment of exquisite transcendence, and when he did almost the exact same thing just two innings later, I knew in my bosom that not only was my team now in fine mid-inning fettle, but that the fundaments of change will always arc toward the path of dialectical improvement.
Until they don’t.
Which I only mention because as we entered the bottom of the 8th clinging to a well-deserved 11-10 lead, I could largely credit the magnificent Bobby Weinapple, who had provided dazzling Hooveresque defense in right despite his hesitation to stray from the infield positions from which his reputational dominance had always burgeoned. Still, as you now know, contradictions arise, stuff happens, and fragments of the material universe inexplicably implode into their oppositional essence (obviously), and thus as we showed the first signs of crackage and the bases began to load with one out and the score suddenly tied, the imitable Jerry Dalo slammed a blistering rocket to right that was, on first blush, headed straight toward Appleboy’s yearnfully extended mitt.
Until it wasn’t.
To be sure, depth perception is a fickle mistress, and thus, far be it for me to suggest that Bobby ‘misplayed’ the hit just because he rushed full blast forward as the orb in question sailed straight to, then above, and then finally 20 yards beyond his confuddled little head, thereby turning a clean rally-containing out into a momentum shifting 3-RBI triple from which we’d never ever recover. Yeah, once again, the inscrutable quadratic interface of kismet and causation and Hegel and DiMaggio raised more questions than it could possibly answer, but no matter, for in the end, the last dialectic of the day was the long and grinding road from joy to sorrow as my team went down, and down hard, 19-11.
Yeah, the point is that it’s hard to plan ahead when there is so much uncertainty built into the physical fibers of existence itself, and that’s especially true now given that next Sunday is July 2nd, which means that next Tuesday is the 4th of July, which means that a lot of you will be celebrating a long four-day weekend in some hideous croc-infested national bog in the middle of nowhere. Fine, be that way, especially if you’re stuck in Florida.
Indeed, I wasn't even going to organize a game this weekend, but then I started thinking about what the Founding Fathers would've wanted me to do (besides outlaw abortions, disseminate AK-47s, and gerrymander the shit out of all the purple states), and it kind of made me think about what we, as a King-George-the-3rd-hating-people, have actually already done. OK, now look, I'm obviously not going to start quoting myself verbatim as if my words had the same resonance as those majestic lines from that sublime 247 year-old Declaration of Effervescence, yet I would gently remind you of what I wrote to all of you in that halcyon Summer of 1997 (and, FWIW, most every year since) . . .
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As the 4th approaches, I am reminded of the intense pressures that Jefferson, Adams and Franklin must have felt when they decided to pen that most momentous of definitive divorces, their very lives at stake as cunning little fish n’chips eating British troops scampered throughout the Pennsylvania bush. These intrepid and indefatigable revolutionaries would have no doubt given anything to play an exciting game of softball, but stuck as they were in the 18th century, they had to settle for yeoman farming and really boring arguments about the nature of mercantilism. I think you see my point. Make that commit. Do it for the children. Do it now. Indeed, the line from Alexander Hamilton to Jackie Robinson to all of you is the very essence of the American experience...
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God, I still get teary-eyed just reading that, which I suppose means that I’m just the type of guy to whom I was trying to appeal. Ironic. And therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11:00, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond