Softball: The Subtle Expansion of Scapegoating in Today’s National Zeitgeist

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

Let the record show that last week’s grueling match was a paragon of see-sawing competitive excellence until it kinda wasn’t. It also was, and will forever be, a towering symbol of the bittersweet truism that sometimes those leaders that are the purest of heart can still inadvertently act as the poison that leads to their own contingent’s tragic demise. 

 

Now look, I’m no reputational masochist, but I have to call it as I see it, and the way I sees it, my team’s fate in its harrowing battle with Eoin’s was inextricably linked to my own feckless performance as both player and coach, and for that, I lain splayed, degraded, and metaphorically nude before this entire league. Fine, may you now be blessed with unyielding aphantasia. 

 

Here's the thing: The impact of my first failure was initially unnoticed, in that all I did was drop Jim McGuire’s crisp 1-on 2-out 2nd inning throw to 1st with an inexplicable collapse of my normally honorable dexterity. Yet over the next eight batters, Eoin led his peeps on a masterful 6-run 2-out rally, and yeah, those 6 runs would come back to leach the very marrow from my bones, cleaved as they were to their ceaseless obsession with proximate causation. Perhaps you see where this is going. 

 

By the time we got to the top of the 8th, we had clawed our way back from a 9 to 4-run deficit, in large part thanks to our 5-run 6th, which was clearly and directly inspired by Kyla and Danny’s fearless son Levi, who quickly climbed up to the gated top roof of the home plate backstop to snag a ball that Kyla had just smashed into a nearly inaccessible crevice lodged at its zenith. In other words, the Leviator galvanized us in ways that I could only dream of, for not only is he at least four score and several years younger than I am, but in his raw athletic prowess, we as a team now saw accelerating hope and renewal.

 

Indeed, as I came to the plate in the top of that penultimate tranche with two out, bases loaded, and I myself as the potential game-tying run, I was certain the inspiration that I emotively imbibed would be all I needed to lead my peeps forward. So, sure enough, I let loose on a rare 3-1 Bobby Fulgham Bull-Gravy ball, but unfortunately, and for reasons I don’t pretend to understand, I instantly popped up to 1st. That’s right, 1st, where my role as official team scourge had begun nearly two hours earlier. 

 

It was, to be sure, a rarefied failure that ended the inning, our rally, and all our fading hopes, and thus as we went down, and down hard, 28-22, I couldn’t help but think that Levi will need to ponder long and hard on the tragic limits of his inspirational preteen influence, and, quite frankly, he may need to do so for countless contemplative decades to come. And therefore there will be a game at Bushrod this Sunday at 11, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond