Softball: The State of the Community

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People,

 

Let the record show that my team battled Professor Jimmy McGuire’s on a gorgeous post-storm winter day in the beating heart of universally cherished Oakland, California—training home of the new Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu! I only mention her because after a deep dive into ChatGPT, MetaAI, and the 1974 World Book entry on Comparative Kinesiology, I’ve concluded that the odds of Alysa hitting a homerun within her first five games with us would be about 1 in 3, whereas the odds of anybody in this community ever landing a classic Liuesque triple lutz with both double axel and double toe loop is about 30 billion to 1. Nevertheless, inspiration doesn’t simply fade away when storied achievement beckons, and thus I myself will soon be heading toward the Oakland Ice Center to begin my own skating journey for the enervating decades to come.

 

In any case, last week’s game featured the long-awaited return of super-sluggers Steve Powers, Matt Gober, and Luke Tanaka, all of whom helped supercharge a match of rarified excellence. Luckily, my side had the Lukester (second cousin once removed of the Liuster herself!—Thanks for asking), whose massive late-inning multi-RBI triple and four-bagger gave us the vital edge we needed going into the final tranches. Indeed, after a seesawing grind through most of the match, we actually pulled out to a commanding 25-12 lead as Jim’s team came up in the bottom of the 9th, but as we all know, glory bursts greatest at the cusp of expiration. In theory.

 

The fact is that Jim led his peeps with vision and courage, and thus when the great Jerry Scheidt unleashed a staggering 2-RBI 1-out-3-to-go mercy-rule-triple, there were suddenly whispers of possibility! Sure enough, they soon clawed their way back to within striking range, and there at the end as the dénouement arrived, they had bases loaded with two out and two to go and the tying run at 1st, and yes, as you can imagine, a frantic American bushtit brayed ceaselessly in the distance. Alas, though, legendary hurler Bobby Fulgham suddenly found resilience in his legendary seminal sinker, and thus with yearnful ducks stuck tragically on the pond, Professor McLoser’s peeps went down in bushtitian tears of heartbreak, 25-22.

 

The point is that after watching nearly two hours of the most mendacious, disingenuous, lawless, sleazy, whiney, toxic, vindictive, delusional, extortionate, authoritarian, puerile, moronic, emetic, venal, repulsive, contemptible, contemptuous, psychopathic, demagogic, misanthropic, solipsistic, unhinged, id-drenched, pre-pubescent, shamelessly corrupt,  malignantly narcissistic, empathy-bereft, humor-devoid, cringe-inducing, and utterly cynical piece of dog-hating human-prop-exploiting shit in the 237-year 45-person history of the American Presidency, I have to admit that I feel a little unclean. However, and despite it all, we have an awesome weekly game to escape to, and the league which makes that happen is both strong and kickass, and therefore there will be one last game at Bushrod Park this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond