softball follies

six leagues, six teams, six families, a million stories in the naked softball follies... ok, so i copped the opening line here from some very old tv show, but the softball follies continue in realtime in thereal, so this entry shall record the fun and folly for the moment...

one team disbanded, leaving five and one is on hiatus (the work team that played together three seasons and took third in it's first season together, second in it's second season together, and first {and we have the throphies and city championship t-shirts to prove it} in it's third season together, rah rah rah), leaving four, but four games a week while working full time and trying to maintain a modicum of social life is nothing to sneeze at...

this week we went 2-2, which is the worst record i've had in at least six weeks (there was a fourteen game winning strewak in there where only my monday night team too a loss for a four week stretch, which was cool and i had a seventeen at-bat hitting streak going during that stretch too)...

this week, however, the sunday team won, beating the first place 1-loss team to move half game out of first place with a 6-2 record with four games left to place (first place team that we beat has a 7-2 record with three left to play)... on sundays i pitch every game... we have a double header next week and a chance to win out and finish at least tied for first to force a playoff...

the monday team lost to the last place team (ironically, the monday team is all male good players who are too macho to swing for base his so most at-bats end up with long fly outs or pop-ups with the occasional home run slipped in for the moment of glory... in softball, the key to winning is stringing lots of simple base hits together and scoring lots of runs, but younger macho males just want to swing as hard as they can every time and that's just what a good pitcher wants)... on mondays i pitch part time and i always play better when i pitch cuz sitting and dh'ing is tougher on this old body... i still hit for my average though... anyway, i think monday is 2-7 or something like that... definitely an effort in futility...

tuesday won to finish 5-5 for the season and that's it for tuesday's team until next season... i pitched five of the games and we won four of them, but it's another all-male league where long fly balls and pop-ups hurt... iu barely hit .500 in this league for one reason or another... hitting is mostly psychological and after going 5-5 in the first game and 3-4 in the second (we split the, going 1-1, because we forfeited the first game cuz not enough players showed up) and then being benched because i don't swing for home runs so i am seen as a poor hitter (go figure the macho brain), we lost four straight and then they decided to pitch me again and we won four straight to be 4-4 and then they decided to bench me again for the last two games and we spilt them... this was the first league i had more than one out in a game and in one game i actually went 1-4, the worst game i've had in two years and more than 100 games)... frustrating...

thursday's team lost it's first game this week to drop to a tie for first place with four or five other teams with a 3-1 record... the macho hitters dominated the game with long fly outs and pop-ups while errors gave the other team runs they shouldn't have had... this was the first game i didn't pitch this season for this team... i did go 2-2... we batted 13 in the line-up, and i was 11th, so i only got up twice... i understand that the coach thinks he is being fair to the other pitcher on the teams where there are two pitchers, but the other pitcher plays third base when he's not pitching on monday and on thursday (the teams overlap about four or five players) and i get to sit and watch because everybody else will give him flack if they are told to sit... anyway, we lose our fastest player who moved out of town this week, so hopefully we can get back to winning next week...

i pitch well and hit well for average and the two teams i pitch 100% of the games are the teams with the worst players but they know that softball is not all about power hitting, so they have had the best records... the other teams are always looking to find another power hitter to add to the team which sits players like me cuz they judge softball skill on power... and the all-male teams are beer-drinking junk-food eating party people who prefer the wing house (hooters-type sports bars) to pretend they are not staring at the scantilly clad waitresses while playing beer drinking games and eating fried everything, which puts me on the outside as i am doing muy best to stay away from junk food and i rarely drink cuz i long ago tired of alcohol (and besides, it's full of calories like junk food) and while the girls are sweet to look at, it's a false social encounter like watching porn or pretending to read playboy for the articles, so i still keep looking for teams that understand the fundamentals and play as a team, rather than for the momentary individual glory of a home run... and healthy eating and lifestyle habits would be a big plus... maybe i should try to get a bunch of vegetarians together for a team... a friend (jackson) talked me into to fronting the money to start a new sunday afternoon team during the other sunday team's off-season and hopefully she will find players who enjoy the game and play the fundamentals of base hits so it'll be more a team fun time... that'll be team seven, by the way...

and there are the softball follies for this week... odd that i choose a week with the worst record of the last five or six weeks (there were a couple of 4-0 weeks in there what with the 14 game winning streak)... maybe i don't take assessment and reord stuff until it balances out cuz writing about it when we are streaking could jinx the streak or maybe it's modesty or humility or maybe, most likely, i simply did not have the time...

anyway, i love the game... hope you do something active that you love too (with friends who share your ideals and interests and lifestyles, even better :)