Softball: Settled

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

First things first: Perhaps Bushrod Park isn’t quite as ‘dazzling’ or ‘majestic’ as I’ve claimed, but the bottom line is that its expansive grasses are freshly mowed and steeped in both grace and grit, and even better, we quickly discovered that there are in fact clean and open bathrooms in the modern buildings on the other side of the fence at the end of deep right field! Who knew?! 

 

So yeah, on balance, it’s clear that we have now found our winter homeland, and that outside of the annoying rains, Oakland Parks and Rec, and the local softball-hating high school softball leagues (and, I suppose among others, the Hayward Fault, various viruses, our wretched kakistocracy, the North Koreans, Big Pickleball, and of course the tragically awful and ceaselessly grief-causing human species writ large), the risk to our hibernal hegemony is simply no match for our phoenix-like resilience.

 

In theory.

 

In any case, on another bracing day of glorious blue skies, my team took on Paul Fine’s with all that we could muster, but it was a hard slog from the second inning onward as the Finester’s peeps unleashed eight consecutive 2-out RBI singles in just over eight minutes! Frankly, that streak was not only unprecedented in the 28-year history of our league, but it was outright eerie, even sinister, until we realized that our entire outfield had been perceptively hoodwinked into self-positioning way too deep thanks to the massive girth of Bushrod’s unusually capacious infields, and I’m not saying that just because it reads like solid prose from a spicy Harlequin romance (for a germane point of reference, see D.K. Slater’s superb  new treatise, A Nominal Blessing: The Post-Bullied Athleticism of Superstar Legends Dick Butkus, Floyd ‘Jumbo’ Cummings, and the Unflappable Rusty Kuntz).

 

The point is that my contingent was suddenly staring down a harrowing 15-4 3rd-inning deficit, but the fact is that we had the intrepid Greg McConnell on our side, and as one who was playing his first match since swapping out his right hip for a brand new one just a mere month earlier (!), his presence at both 3rd on defense and slugging away at the plate were all I needed to emotively galvanize my entire contingent into a well-oiled and rally-focused machine. Yes, we were both verklempt and titanium-strong, and thus by the time we got to the bottom of the 9th with two on, two out, and the tying run now at bat, the tension was so thick that, needless to say, a clowder of spotted North Oakland dik-diks brayed frantically in the distance.

 

Alas, it was all for naught and then some, for not only did my side still go down, and down hard, 19-16, but Greg’s bionic failure to triumph showed once again that organized sport, like so many human endeavors, is a curiously callous enterprise with utter indifference to the objectively heroic. And therefore there will be a game at Bushrod Park this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond