Softball: Another Venue for Punctuated Equilibrium

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

Let the record show that just five batters into my team’s Battle Royale with Chris Fure’s, the dazzling Mark ‘Titanium’ Laber unleashed a jaw-dropping line drive straight up the middle that crested at just under 7/8th the speed of light. Curiously though, legendary pitcher Bobby Fulgham— perhaps inspired by Alex Honnold’s unparalleled free solo conquest of Taipei 101 the night before—decided to try and ‘catch’ said orb with the inner talus of his fearless left ankle. 

 

Free ankling, of course, is generally ill-advised as a matter of tactics and bone, yet the fact is that after collapsing supine onto the harsh clays below, the Fulghamator was back hurling within minutes, and no, I don’t mean the type of hurling that I had to violently suppress with my totally queasy being. Luckily, I succeeded at doing so, and thus I can report that my 58-year chunder-free streak that began in the Summer of ’68 continues unabated —Thank you for asking.

 

The point is that it’s hard for an entire team to shake off such a harrowing Newtonian assault, for little rivulets of weary thought invade the communal mind—tacit little musings like “This cannot stand” and “We must do it for Bobby,” and “Let’s recover as a communal whole and then grind them into dust!” And sometimes those musings eerily transubstantiate from the mental to the inscrutable physical realm, as seen an hour later in the bottom of the 6th, with the score taut and tied at 13 as a cackle of nervous little North Oakland Saiga Antelope brayed frantically in the distance. Yeah, it was time.

 

That’s right, over the next 30 minutes, my contingent exploded for 14 runs on 15 hits, 2 walks, 2 errors, and a righteous wave of calibrated kick-ass, and while no doubt that various league historians will grasp for the supposed roots of this unsightly carnage—from the new 4-ball-walk-rule to Captain Fure’s total inability to course-correct, galvanize, or even truly ‘understand’ what was befalling his peeps—the fact is that sometimes shit just happens, and yes, but for that one little half of a tranche, his team would’ve beat my own by one solid run!

 

Of course such counter-factual drivel is not the way anything of import works in the real world, with its arrow of time, its annoying lack of free will, and its brutal indifference to the sorrow of the defeated. Indeed, Christopher will need to think long and hard in the guilt-laden decades to come, for when your own team goes down in an accelerating vortex of leaderless despair, 28-15, circuitous is the path to even a smidge of grace or atonement. And therefore there will be a game at Bushrod this Sunday at 11, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond