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Here's small memoir to celebrate the opening of
baseball season.
Maybe it’s that
Everest-sized mound of snow remaining in my driveway, but lately I’ve been
thinking about the days when I played softball for Pleasant Journey Used Cars in
Northampton’s mixed-sex summer league.
My wife and I moved to
Northampton, MA in 1985, and my decision to play with “PJs” was one of my wiser
ones. I’d like to say PJs was a fabulous team, but I think we had a winning
record just once in the five years I played. The team reflected the character
of owner/manager Bob, who remains a kind, generous friend. His motives for
fielding a team were, in order of priority: making friends, having fun, catching
some sun, enjoying post-game fellowship, and competition. A lot of our
competitor teams consisted of hell-bent-on-winning folks in their late teens or
early twenties; PJ’s was mostly over 30 with an occasional graybeard within
sight of 50. Team motto: “We may be slow, but we’re old.”
We did have some very good
players. Our shortstop, Rich, could clobber the ball and dazzle with the glove;
nothing got by Patty at third and she was amazingly strong. When Patty wasn’t
at third, Jessie was nearly her equal. John was another great fielder and was
fleet of foot, though not nearly as swift as his wife, Elaine–the fastest
person I've ever met. She couldn’t hit the ball further than 20 feet but if she made contact, she was on base.
Peter was also a good player, as were Bob and Chris. Yours truly was a decent
hitter—one year I hit nearly .700—but I was definitely a singles and doubles
guy with very little power. I was pretty good with the glove too, though the
less said about my throwing arm, the better.
Mostly we were a reverse
Lake Woebegone: slightly below average. Bob’s son, Dereck, kept score on a cleverly
fashioned electric scoring board powered by a car battery that he lugged to the
field of combat, and he often needed to jerry-rig some crooked numbers–for the
other team. PJs had what can be charitably called a fungible roster fashioned
from newcomers, friends, spouses, paramours, and persons of interest. Because
we were older than most teams, many
of us had work and family obligations that prevented us from attending every
game. When you showed up on a given night, there might be 20 people vying for
nine slots, or just seven. Bob’s position was that if you were there, you
played—a democratic worldview at odds with a winning-is-everything ethos. Some
times we lost games we would have won with our best nine on the field. Meh! We
made fun of those who confused recreational softball with game seven of the
World Series.
More often we often found
ourselves short of players. On
those nights, we drafted partners and friends no matter how loudly they
protested they were “no good” or didn’t know the game rules. As we hysterically
discovered, most were telling the truth! Some draftees had to be tutored on how
to hold a bat and there simply wasn’t enough time to consider the fundamentals
of catching.
No one was too lonely, lost,
or un-athletic for PJs. Just moved to town? Show up and someone will loan you a
glove. Danny had cystic fibrosis, couldn’t see well, and was fairly immobile. We
didn’t care. When Danny hit a dribbler we screamed as if he had launched a moon
shot over the light stanchion. We also had some eccentrics on the team. Ron had
a powerful arm capable of gunning down anyone reckless enough to try stretching
a cheap single into an even cheaper double. The problem was he had no idea
where the throw would land once it left his hand. Rumor has it that some of the
comets in the summertime sky are Ron’s errant throws. Dave was a pretty good
player—when he was focused. When he wasn’t, it was as if he paused mid-pitch to
compose haiku.
Even our practices were like
Keystone Kops outtakes. Once we tried to practice at Child Park. After about
ten minutes, a guard appeared to tell us that “organized games” were not allowed
there. I pointed out that it was inaccurate to call us “organized.” He agreed that
I had a point, but we still had to move on.
After a few years, most of
us crossed the line between being getting older and fearing we might seriously
hurt ourselves. Peter kept the team running for a while—longer than he should
have, as he later conceded. Left behind, though, was something far better than
a winning record: a passel of good friends and a field of memories. --Rob Weir
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