Softball: Relief

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

First things first: The paranormal is not actually a topic within my expertise, so I would personally view with robust skepticism any recent drivel that I may have spewed on the eerie persistence of the curse or jinx or hex or whatever the fuck it is that’s consistently rendered the initially dominating team for any given game into nothing less than a floundering and defeated shell of their early-inning kickass. Still, that pattern has now actually played out for several disturbing weeks in a row, and so convincingly that when Stefano’s posse jumped out to a blistering 13-4 lead after just four innings, I was nearly giddy in knowing that I myself would finally lead a contingent that could exploit this confuddling statistical tear in the space-aerobic continuum, or, as most sports aficionados still call it, The SAC (for a germane point of reference, see D.K. Slater’s delightful new treatise of surprisingly unchartered scholarship, Just a Pair of Oddballs: A Social History of Shameless Scrotal Humor in Post-War Northern Florida, 1945-1953).

 

The point is that by both pattern and right, my side should’ve stirred in wait, slowly rallied, and then struck hard with the coup de grâce, but apparently my own peeps didn’t get the memo, perhaps because they didn’t know what a coup de grâce is. In any case, we continued to flail at the plate, for while we hit with admirable rigor, almost every ball darted straight toward the glove of a waiting partisan, and thus in the end, the insidious spell in question broke, and broke hard, but tragically, on the dignity-crushing streak of my 5th consecutive loss, 18-5. 

 

Now look, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Ray, perhaps ‘the spell’ isn’t really about one team jumping out to a commanding lead before collapsing in some eerily Hegelian intra-match dialectic, but maybe it’s about the fact that as captains go, you suck.” Trust me, I’ve thought long and hard about this myself, but after a deep dive into the organizational risks of pre-game roster-protesting agitation and some soothing primal scream therapy, I have to conclude that this latter hypothesis simply doesn’t make any sense.

 

In any case, the real point is that whether or not I’m banned by the people from ever captaining again, I can assure you that as official game organizer I will do whatever it takes to stop the horde of illegal soccer-playing interlopers from overrunning our homeland and continually eating our cherished pet rutting yaks. Yeah, I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve always enjoyed the rarified skills of a true master baiter (haha), and therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond