Softball rules

The spring soon ending is the first in 12 years (1994, and I was studying six hours a day for my comps), I haven't played softball.

From 1995 through 2005, as player and (oftentime) manager, I played softball with an occasional bliss I rarely found in any other physical endeavor--not jogging, rarely golf, only one time in basketball: on a frigid December night, on a driveay court on High Island so close to the Gulf of Mexico I could hear the lap of the waves in the darkness out beyond the sand berms.

In softball, I felt this bliss every week. My enjoyments were, in every respect, different from my teammates. I preferred practice to playing, fielding to hitting, outfield to infield. By that standard, my bliss was in the outfield, during Friday afternoon practice, sprinting after a fly ball, drawing a bead, feeling the catch.

And afterward, sitting on the ground beneath the shade tree, drinking one's first beer as the sun went down, feeling the first murmurs in the legs that foretold the aches and cramps of Saturday morning, making plans for Sunday's game. Monday never felt so far away.

And this year, I gave it all up. And I never understood why so much as when I read
this article. In Jame Caple's article, "All I Really Need to Know About My Office I Learned on the Company Softball Team," the usual suspects are dragged forth. Examples:

Teamwork: Beware of outfielders who roam far beyond their position and never listen when they're called off and hog all the fly balls to themselves. These fielders assume no one ever can do the job as well as they can. Such micromanagers will butt their noses into everyone else's business, repeatedly lengthen office meetings by interrupting with their (misguided) opinions and (unworkable) suggestions and also constantly annoy you by asking if your TPS reports are done yet.

Versatility Pays: People who demand to play only one position and then sulk if you don't let them are nothing but trouble. Generally speaking, players who aren't adaptable to multiple positions usually aren't very good at the single position they want to play, either. Guaranteed, these people will sue you the minute you try promoting someone better qualified to a management job ahead of them.

And then there is always this ubiquitous one, or three, on every team:

Be Prompt: This is obvious. If you're always staring at your watch and telling the umpire to give you just a few more minutes for the 10th player to arrive, you'll wind up waiting for the same unreliable guy to show up for work in the morning or return from lunch. He'll also be the first guy out the door in the afternoon. And yet, somehow, he'll still be late for the game.

My league was intramural, not business, but this last description struck to the heart of what was so soul-destroying about joining a softball league. My greatest day as a softball manager was the day the women's team I managed stormed to a 13-1 championship victory to cap off an undefeated season, whereupon I (the third-string pitcher, our starter having broken her ankle and her replacement proven erratic) took the mound for a 6-2 co-ed championship victory. This day was the end of two years of concerted effort by about seven of my friends and I; the eight of us had gone from spring league to summer practice to fall city league to spring intramurals to summer tournament to fall city league, and finally to spring intramurals. By spring, 2002, we were breathing fire.

Along the way, I encountered that worst specimen of teammate: not only the tardy, but the tardy-with-attitude, the type who would show up after the forfeit and be upset that you were upset. The type who would hit a ground ball, jog down the first base line, be out by half a step when the first baseman dropped the ball and then say, "Ah, it's only a game."

To these people you'd say: We know it's a game. We know, Jim Rome aside, that we're not playing in Game 7 of the World Series. But there is something to dignity of effort, something to trying. The seven people I played with knew this, and it was only a matter of finding two other people who felt the same way.

Eventually the search for those last two people became too much, too degrading. Getting ten people together at one time became too much. So this spring, back to jogging. I miss softball--or rather, I miss those moments of total abandon in the outfield, the tracking of the ball, the give of my glove. Other stuff, I don't miss at all.