Day 157: Summer Softball

This has been a hard summer. For various reasons, I’ve yet to play golf, and golf was the game I started playing in earnest to take the place of playing softball when I gave that up years ago. I miss playing softball. I miss it for a lot of reasons, mostly because I just loved the game. At times, softball could be exciting, heated, demoralizing, and fulfilling in a brief stretch of moments. It was also a hell of an escape from the stress of life.

Most of all, I miss the camaraderie of hanging out with guys that softball supplied. I played on the same team with mostly the same guys for, man, roughly 15 years or so. Every spring we’d gather for a few practices before spending the summer taking the field a couple times during the work week to do our thing. On the weekends, we’d trudge off to some city or town and hopefully spend all day Saturday and Sunday doing the same in one tournament or another. You get to know people pretty well when you spend that much time together, and you get to be friends. You even enter a few battles, including some where coming to blows appears unavoidable. You get to know your teammates’ wives and kids, as well, and you look forward to seeing them and you enjoying seeing how much they’ve grown during the offseason. When all that ends, it’s hard to replace.

Look, I’m not trying to make myself out as some gloried athlete who had to walk off into the sunset and is missing his glory days. At best, I was a fair to average player. I could hold my own, and on some occasions I was clutch. But better than anyone, I realize a softball game is just a softball game. The world isn’t going to stop turning in the event of a loss. No one ever threw a parade because I hit one out to dead left. But when you enjoy something, it doesn’t really matter what it is that elicits the happiness. It’s the happiness that’s important.  

I could probably still play softball if I really wanted to. Hell, I saw plenty of guys playing well into their late 50s. The thought of waking up on a Monday morning and pulling my work pants up over a big-ass strawberry I got on my butt sliding into second is in no way appealing anymore, however. Neither are the sore shoulders, sore feet, abs, and grounders taken off the shins, forearms, and face. Just as unappealing is standing in 100-degree July heat for five games in a row or waking up with a hangover early Sunday morning after getting drunk Saturday night, only to have to take the field to play the first game of the day because you lost your last game the night before. I don’t miss the bitching and moaning from guys who swear “I should be batting third, damn it” or “I don’t know why I’m playing right field.” I don’t miss the glares from an irate wife after I showed up late for some engagement or another because that one beer after the game stretched into 12. I don’t miss muscled-up hotheads who couldn’t control their temper and who defined their entire lives by how far they hit a round white ball. I sure don’t miss those 9:15 p.m. games on Monday night that didn’t really start until 9:40 and didn’t really end until 11.

What I do miss are the nicknames. Plug. Special K. The Finagler. Spewdog. Rat.

I miss playing on my work teams with guys who’d never played before and didn’t know left from right field.

I miss the routines, like playing pepper.

I miss sitting in a bar between games and soaking in the A/C.

I miss playing keno and ballpark food.

I miss the trips to Kansas City and Iowa and sitting in the hotel parking lot drinking cool ones from a community cooler.

I miss playing on astro-turf.

I miss playing deep into the night in games where you’d have to score a run in the last inning or stop the other team from doing the same.

I miss the inside jokes and the rally cries made in unison that only your teammates knew the meaning of, like “onion powder” or “EPIGAWA.”

I miss keeping book.

I miss fall ball and playing co-ed. 

I miss the high-five walk after a win.

I miss getting a new hat every season and getting it filthy by the third game.

I miss the rally inning.

I miss the #17 on my back.

I miss pulling my glove out of my ball bag, fishing out a decayed, cracked softball, and saying “who wants to throw?”

I miss the feeling of watching a ball that I’ve hit go over the fence (I didn’t happen that often) or driving a ball into the gap and watch it one-hop off the fence.

I miss the warning track.

I miss diving for balls, turning double plays, scooping a ball out of the dirt, and rubbing dirt on the bat’s handle.

I miss the smell of grass at night and the shadows of crisscrossing ballpark lights.

I miss seeing my kids, young and full of life, climbing up and down the bleachers.

I miss wearing my spikes and the smell of Ben-Gay.

I miss spitting sunflower seeds all day long.

I miss the batter’s box and the dugout.

I miss playing second base.

I miss being on deck.

I miss throwing the ball around the horn.

I miss spending seven innings at a time with my friends.