Softball: A Shocker at the Polls!

[raymond...@gmail.com]

Dear People, 

 

Let the record show that for the first game of this already wretched month, community legends Saxon Cropper-Sykes and Darwin Davila returned to play after years away in the softball-bereft podunk towns of Chicago and New York. Even better, they’ll both soon be back for good, and thus ready to reestablish their positions as the moral backbones of this entire league! Or, perhaps each one will flounder as the creaky boneage of aging-from-relative-youth takes its inevitable toll, but for this last match, at least, they were both on my side, they were both superb, and in large part because of them, my team played Chris Fure’s to a riveting 7th-inning 7-7 tie before methodically crushing them into a spicy-hot paste of harissa-braised loser-liver, 17-8. 

 

Of course, any given match is an ephemeral mistress on which to hang great significance, which is why it’s now time to quickly move on and focus on the fact that what followed the final out of said game has the potential to fundamentally transform the very fabric of this league. Yeah, are you sitting down? That’s right, mes petits pomme de terre, gird your loins and take some deep breaths because we had our annual Proposed New Year Rule-Change Vote (PNYRCV), as all true aerobic democracies must. And while there were only two, they both passed, and passed hard, and I for one was shaken to the very marrow of my reform-wary bones. They are:

 

1) After a year-long experiment in which there were no forced walks, four pitched non-strike balls was an optional walk, and six pitched non-strike balls was an optional walk to 2nd base (!), we have taken a cue from the radically shifting reversals of electoral politics and voted to swing back to a baseballesque regime of severe pitcher-disciplinitude. To wit:

 

Batters must take a walk on the 4th pitched non-strike ball.

 

Needless to say, this new rule has already triggered a tidal wave of bitter scholarly debate and unprecedented anxiety, from Bushrod to Baghdad, but at the end of the electoral day, the people have spoken, nutso though they may be (no aspersions intended).

 

 

2-The decades old Mercy Rule, which held that a team leading by 10 or more runs at the start of any half-inning would only have two outs for that tranche, while a team trailing by 10 or more runs at the start of any half-inning would get four outs for that tranche (five outs for a 20+ run lead), has been amended to eliminate the first half of the rule, so that the entire rule is now only:

 

Any team trailing by 10 or more runs at the start of a half inning gets four outs (five outs for a 20+ run lead), but the leading team STILL gets three outs.

 

 Needless to say, this new rule has also triggered a tidal wave of bitter scholarly debate and unprecedented anxiety, this time from Oakland to Osaka, yet it’s hardly for me to throw shade by suggesting that the people are bold, sassy, and surprisingly tolerant of degradation-oozing blowouts. Rather, I would simply say that there is still much to learn about what it means to be human, and what that inscrutable prefrontal cortex is really all about.

 

In any case, and as per our league rules, traditions, and neuroses, a second and final vote for the year will be held in a few weeks at our first match back at Codornices, where brand new rule changes can be proposed, and these two just passed can be revisited in the probing light of data, experience, and the gnawing realization that at the end of the day, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And therefore there will be a game at Bushrod this Sunday at 11, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond