Softball: A Hex in the Local Environs

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

For the second consecutive week and the third match of the last five, my team quickly jumped out to a dominating double-digit lead—specifically, 16-6 over Chris Fure’s in the 3rd— only to face another harrowing encounter with Premature Early Inning Shot-wad Syndrome (or, as it’s known in the sports med milieu, PEISS; For a germane point of reference, see D.K. Slater’s deeply unsettling portrait of 18th century royal mores, Callow, Yearnful and Always too Fast: The Forgotten Pubescent Beefcakes of Queen Anne’s Court, 1702-1714). To be sure, we weren’t the first to crest too early and we clearly won’t be the last, but given that I had written about all this just last week, the self-fulfilling nature of this wretched curse left me shaken to the marrow. 

 

Still, we didn’t collapse without a fight. Indeed, some of our best fielding came in the middle innings, and as late as the 7th we faced a grueling tie game that could’ve gone either way. Of course fate had its own designs, and as the fearsome Joe Poppas came to the plate in the bottom of the 7th with one out, two on and the aura of aerobic transmogrification lingering in the air, a rare blue-beaked American bushtit brayed plaintively in the distance. Then, suddenly, Poppy unleashed a solid hopper just to the right of 2nd that initially had the inchoate contours of a rally-crushing double-play, and for that last second of quaint athletic innocence, I could still feel the rays of cautious hope.

 

Unfortunately, and for reasons I don’t pretend to understand, the great Bobby Weinapple was manning the ramparts when he decided to snag the hopper in question with the bony frontal lobe of his perfectly innocent forehead. Needless to say, this is a fairly difficult task to actually pull off, and while I personally avoided fainting, Applehead lain down and woozy for several minutes before rising anew to a hero’s ovation. All good and well, of course, but heroism is no substitute for robust defense, and ultimately, the hit, the RBI, the ceaselessly shifting mo’ and the sudden realization that sociological physics is just one brutally random wench was simply too much to bear, and thus my side went down, and down hard, 25-19. Yeah, curses, and therefore there will be a game at Codorncies this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond