Softball: Historiography as an Art that Hasn’t Quite Arrived Yet

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

I have to confess that sometimes these games aren’t really worthy of history’s probing eye, and in last Sunday’s match, we apparently saw the fallow seed corn of a recreational organism tumbling straight into the long dark night of aerobic oblivion. Now, to be fair, there were moments of great experiential clarity, even inspiration. For example, on Chris Fure’s team, Eoin once again blasted a 2-RBI orb 100 feet over the tundra line beyond deep sharp left while the great Dave Snyder went a dazzling 5 for 5 despite jetlag! Yeah, sublime athleticism still leaves me awe-struck.

 

On my side, of course, Steve Bedrick continued his gonadal-ball renaissance by giving up no more than two runs in any inning (!), while, at the same time, the remarkable Bobby Weinapple solidified the burgeoning of his defensive skill sets with a kickass performance as rotator that included his surprisingly catastrophicless debut at short. In brief, there were individual players from both sides who were not bereft of the blood, bone and passion that clearly makes softball the world’s most cherished sport, and yet, few would deny that for this particular match, there was torpidity and jejunitude in spades, and I think it’s pretty clear why.

 

Despite it all, the fact is that history does matter, and yes, it just so happens that I was reading yesterday about the last Roman Emperor, the largely forgotten Romulus Augustulus, who sat and fiddled while the Scirians and their smelly barbarian hordes sacked Rome whole in 476AD. Oh sure, the kid had only been on the throne for a few months and in fairness, he was only 10 at the time, but still, history shows he did nothing to lead or inspire, and in that course of inaction we see painful lessons of irrefutably current salience. 

 

Indeed, as my team jumped out to a 15-4 5th-inning lead, Captain Furefeathers, who, for the record, has 25 years of managerial experience and is at least thrice as old as the Romufailure was in 476, sat on the bleachers and fiddled and told charming stories and jokes and bantered about as if the degrading 10-run Mercy Rule would somehow save his crumbling athletic empire. But that’s not how life or management works, of course, and as my peeps continued to dominate, the depth of his indifference was so profound that he even forgot to unleash his unseemly but frequently employed Cash-for-Runs galvanization program. Yeah, it was that bad, and thus with neither hope nor guidance nor a scintilla of inspirational mojo, his floundering contingent went down and down hard in abject degradation, 20-11.

 

Now look, I’ve already noted that history’s probing gaze is unlikely to focus future generations on this particular match if for no other reason than very few records of its occurrence will actually survive, and while the tale is clearly a staggering one of captainship in collapse, I also assume there will be no known policies, decisions or inscriptions of significance from Chris’ time at the helm, and to that extent, he could leave the impression that he was a shadowy and relatively inconsequential figure. Fair enough, and yet for Chris qua Chris, the distant future’s oblivious indifference in this case does not foreclose the prospect of eventual recognition if he has the simple courage to engage in reform, atonement and renewal in the immediate decades ahead (to be sure, no intractable aging issue has he!), and therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond