Take Me Out...

My softball double-header scheduled for tonight was cancelled for... reasons unknown. I think the field was inspected and deemed unplayable. Honestly. A month ago we played in a thunderstorm, and tonight the grass is just a little too wet? Since I'm going to miss four games while I'm overseas, I was really looking forward to this weekend's set of double-headers (we play on Sunday, too-- rescheduled games from three weeks ago when the weatherman predicted "severe storms." We got... um, clear skies all night).

I played baseball and softball until I was ten; that was the season where my batting average dropped so drastically that my parents took me to get my eyes checked. Turns out I needed glasses. And that was the end of my team sports career. (I often wonder why I let it be the end; probably because my glasses were horrible, huge pink-rimmed things, and to add insult to injury, I would have been forced to wear horrible, huge chemistry-lab-esque googles over them to play. That was enough to kill my very real dreams of being a professional ball player.)

So it's been a couple years... or fifteen. But when my brother, WS, first mentioned the idea of putting together a co-ed league softball team, I was on board immediately. My father, who coached both of us in the early days, took it upon himself to mold me back into the softball player buried beneath the years of sedentary activity (um, reading on the couch). He took me to the batting cage and played catch with me-- wow, it's almost like a sports movie montage. And I improved significantly, and now all I want to do is play softball.

WS is the team's manager/coach, and the team itself is mostly made up of people with whom he works and their significant others. We have a continually rotating roster in which WS and I are the only people who have played in every game. This is both good and bad: good when the absolutely sweet but truly terrible players can't make it, and bad when the I-played-softball-for-my-state-champion-team-in-college players can't make it. Last Friday, so few of our players showed up that we had to recruit two-thirds of our team from our fans. Really. People came to cheer us on and ended up playing for us.

It's was actually my favorite game of the season so far. Ultimately, I am forced to let go of my super-competitiveness (blame WS, whose mantra is "life's a competition") and accept that we are a ragtag bunch. The Bad News Bears of the adult softball league. Only we don't win games. Ever.

But yay! There is still one team in the league with a worse record than ours.

Okay, I can let go of some of my super-competitiveness...