What We Talk About When We Talk About Softball

Playing in a co-ed softball league: is it good exercise? Is it everything you hoped and dreamed? Do you acquire enough statistics to run them through an awesome sabermetric analysis?

Well, I've been biking to a lot of the practices, which is good exercise. I think my immediately softball-related expectations are met, so that's fine. Besides one Game Played, I only have three statistics, and two of them are zeroes.

I like wearing a baseball glove, and standing in grassy places, so that tracks pretty well with softball.

The field is behind a high school off a commercial road in East Haven; it's surrounded thickly by trees; there are all kinds of mosquitos there. Thursday is game night. I've been hitching a ride to the field with a teammate who also works at the University. There are 10 starters and usually about 4 subs. We wear matching gold t-shirts with our team name and an advertisement for a hardware store.

I've only played in one game since we've only played three games, and in two of them we got mercy ruled before I subbed in. The other one I started as a left-center fielder batting tenth: a classic softballish made-up position and made-up batting spot! 2 for 2! Well, not literally 2 for 2.

The social vibe is OK, though I don't feel any kind of particular friendship coming on with the other players. There are actually other people who show up just to watch these games (the team is under the auspices of this social internet MeetUp group in New Haven) and some of them are fun to chat with. (Though this behavior strikes me as weird. I myself would not drive to East Haven just to watch a softball game, and not just because I don't have a car.) There's drinking afterwards, in New Haven, so I can just hang there till I start wallflowering and then foot it home. Happy almost weekend!

Softball, always and everywhere, would be much, much better if everyone just took it a little less seriously. It is very casual. But you know, a little more casual . . . Our game Thursday night was interrupted after twenty minutes by a heavy rainstorm, thunder and lightning. We played through ten minutes of this, then had two hours' worth of delay-game-delay-game, so that the game could count in the league standings. The other team finally fifteen-runned us in the fourth or fifth or some damn inning. Fortunately I wasn't in the starting lineup, so I stayed pretty dry, underneath some of the fieldside trees, with some of the people-there-to-watch.

This ridiculousness soaks all these people through, again, for the sake of the game counting in the standings. Look: just a little more casual, a little less serious?

We did, ironically, get "rained out" once before, not because it was raining but because the field was in terrible shape from rain the day before. This probably explains the mosquito problem. I'd skipped that game anyway, since Michael Tilson Thomas was conducting Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements at Carnegie Hall the same night with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

I also don't like this fifteen-run Mercy Rule, since it takes twenty people from a state of "playing softball" to "not playing softball even though you could be." This, provided it's nice out, is a waste. There should be a per-inning run rule, to keep things from getting out of control, and then you keep going, dammit.

I had an anxiety dream about catching fly balls last night. I couldn't catch them. I really don't think this merits that much anxiety.

The team is 0 and 3 right now. I expect one of those numbers will keep changing throughout the season.

Thinking about this does make me kind of want to play softball right now, which means it must count for something.