Out of Cheese

I signed up for Apple’s slow-pitch summer softball league last week. I’d thought about playing for a while, and when someone asked if I wanted to play, I jumped at the opportunity. One catch — I hadn’t actually caught, thrown, or hit a ball in about fifteen years, and that was with baseball, not softball. The rules for this league imply that men will be better than women, but if you compare me to a woman with any reasonable amount of talent, I can make a mockery of those rules. If nothing else, I bet they expect that men can throw the ball all the way across the infield on the fly. I could do that with a baseball, but softballs are heavy!

Anyway, today was our first practice. I found out that after all those years, I can still mostly field ground balls, so that’s good. It’s especially good because I’d prefer to play a middle infield position over anything else, and fielding grounders is probably the most important part of that job. Outfield is out because I could never catch fly balls (we’ll see how I do on popups…probably poorly), third base is out because that’s a really long way to throw, first base requires me to field too well, and I’m certainly not about to pitch or catch. So if I end up being a shortstop, I think I’ll be at least OK in the field. Fortunately it isn’t a very competitive league, so OK, while not great, is good enough.

I also realized that I still can’t hit. I did manage to put the bat on just about every pitch I saw during batting practice — much better than I did in Little League — but there’s a big difference between making contact and hitting the ball solidly. Or hitting it far, for that matter. Most of my swings resulted in soft grounders to shortstop. (Hey, I bet I could field those!) I have a feeling that I’d be a lot better if I could take a few hours and face a couple hundred pitches. I wonder if there are any places around here that rent out indoor pitching machines for slow-pitch softball.

Unfortunately, I also realized that after all these years, I still break easily. I took a ground ball off my right thumb midway through the practice and kept playing, but now my thumb has a nice purply bruise on it. It still moves just fine, though, and it’s only a little bit sore, so I don’t think anything too serious is wrong with it. Hopefully it’ll be all better before our next practice.