Dear People,
Let the record show that my team battled the great Anthony Weatheroy’s in what the Antman himself announced was his final game before retiring to the paternal weekend duties of raising his cherished daughter Annabell. To be sure, it was a deeply personal and poignant match given its transcendent significance, and yet, a subtle tear in his contingent’s basic cohesion became manifest by the end of the 4th as my side jumped out to a somewhat unsightly 29-14 lead. Still, it would be too easy by half to claim that just because my own peeps were on fire, somehow Chris Fure’s blend of ceaselessly whackable curve, semen and glandular balls was somehow ‘responsible’ for their early-inning plunge into dignity-bereft despair.
Indeed, no pitcher is an island, entire of himself, for every pitcher is a part of the athletic whole, a part of the team. Nevertheless, and just to be clear, John Donne may have been a master of 17th century verse, but he was obviously a blithering idiot as well, and one who clearly knew little about softball or science. So yeah, at the end of the retrospective day, no one could fault Tony for concluding mid-game that Chris was in fact totally disconnected from his own peeps—flailing about on a sinking island-mound and neck deep in hope-crushing failure.
That’s right, Anthony knew in his bosom that only a fundamental reshuffling of the ramparts could save his floundering posse, for Chris had given up 29 runs in four innings, and at that rate, basic Newtonian physics suggested he would’ve surrendered a ghastly league record of 67 had they stayed the tragic course. Sometimes, of course, leadership means being cruel to be kind, and sure enough, by switching out Furfeathers for Eoin, Tony found a dazzling hurler of inimitable gifts, raw Irish focus and a yaw-intensive sinker to turn it all around. In fact, my side would only score four more runs in the entire last half of the match, providing, quite frankly, Donne-dissing proof that isolated pitchers who are not truly part of the actual whole both matter and exist, dreadful though they may be.
In any case, turnarounds are all about timing, and like the Fed, the last thing you want to do is act too late. The fact is that with Eoin’s steady balls, Karen’s dominating D at 3rd, Reno and Matt’s searing line drives, and Tony’s own galvanizing 8th-inning triple, they all courageously clawed their way back, and yet in the end, the gap was too vast and the wound too deep, and thus much like the Tang Dynasty in the throes of its painful 10th century demise, they still went down, and down hard, 33-28. Needless to say, there is much to ponder.
Most importantly, we as a community will need to both accept and process Anthony’s sudden retirement, and yet that doesn’t mean that in the weeks and months to come, Annabell herself won’t have her say. To be sure, I believe she’ll soon look back at this momentous match, and being the precocious kid that she is, she’ll gently tell her cherished daddy that retirement is a durationally nebulous mistress, and that’s all the more so given how clear it is that poets are not prognosticators, and the Tang, weirdos that they were, are not prologue, and that even the Fed can learn anew from their dilatory ways. At a minimum, and across the generations, I assume we can all back Annabell and agree on all that, and therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond