Softball: Science, Always Science

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

On another perfect East Bay morn’, Chris Fure and I sat down just minutes before the game to fine-tune the rosters I had crafted the night before, and while our tête-à-tête was initially a soothing one under the cloudless blue skies above, I personally could feel the broader surrounding turbulence of nature herself. Indeed, just 10 miles away, nearly a dozen morning tremblers of 3.0 or more were shaking the nervous-nellies of San Ramon to their very core. So yeah, when disputatious yakity-yak arose between Chris and me over the most logically rigorous way to assure Rosterfarian balance on paper, it was perhaps inevitable that a rare pride of Lake Anza rutting sturgeons snorted plaintively in the distance.

 

In any case, the Furinator initially did his job, and did it well, by pointing out an embarrassing error in my aerobic calculus–– specifically, that I had given my own team a significant advantage in hitting, fielding, and ontological sagacity. This was a full two check imbalance by his own player pairings, which I totally accepted and apologized for, and yet when I thus insisted we do a robust tweak in the form of one top-tier stud for one whose tierage was substantially lower, he looked at me gently with those gorgeous baby blues or browns or whatever the hell they are, and solemnly told me “Nah, this is a game about captainship; Let’s keep things as they are.” Needless to say, I tried to use history, scale, context, athletic reason, common sense, and even weed to make my case for parity, but he didn’t budge, and so off we went, with the rank specter of disequilibrium lingering in the air—subtle, unjust, and utterly rife with potential disgrace. 

 

Here’s the thing about leadership: It’s not what you want to do, it’s what you actually do do (pun possibly intended), and with all due respect, two dropped cans of corn, 0 for 5 at the plate, and a total lack of the inspirational galvanization that has delighted softball-lovin’ infracaninophiles for centuries is not a recipe for a serious challenge against the odds. More to the point, Christopher quickly learned that floundering is not a strategy and incoherence is not a virtue, and thus, not unexpectedly, his entire contingent went down, and down hard, 20-11. 

 

Still, and in fairness, I happened to be Wiki-surfing last night as I’m wont to do, when I stumbled upon the fact that atomically speaking, two separate objects never actually touch since electromagnetic repulsion acts on the electrons of each object, keeping them clearly separate from each other and everything else. Frankly, I’m a doer and not a spectator, so I never really noticed this, but in learning the brute facts as they are, I can suddenly see why Captain Jejune was so utterly feckless in his managerial duties (To be sure, are there truly any “cans of corn” when mitt can never actually touch ball?!).

 

So yeah, it would’ve been easy after the match to point to his smiling cherubic face on a cynically framed wall poster and then claim to his 10 deeply embittered peeps that “history will not be kind,” but I for one now understand that we have much more to learn about nature and her wacko essence before ever casting such deeply satisfying aspersions. And therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond