5/12/99
Softball: Mistakes
Dear People,
Congratz to all on last weekend's slightly less than compelling 12-10 exercise in delicately balanced recreational torpor. In viewing the game from the sweep of a greater retrospective gestalt, one cannot help but take note of the curious dialectical evolution of the interplay between score ("close") and drama ("not"), thus once again confounding those aerobic theorists who automatically link these two values in a tightly interwoven dance of proportional accretion. Pity.
In any case, as most of you undoubtedly know, this Saturday, May 15th, is the 95th anniversary of the day that legendary Red Sox shortstop Frank Chance was hit by a pitch five times in a single afternoon, in what must have been the most physically painful double header in the history of professional baseball. Of course, there was never hard evidence produced that those five pitches were anything but a statistically anomalous accident, and yet I have always felt deep in my innards that the three Yankee pitchers who partook in Frankie's pulverization must have conspired in a plot most foul and unsporting.
No, I will not call for a reopening of this case, for I am fully aware that whatever evidence I could gather to validate my intuition had certainly grown stale by the early to middle Reagan years. Nevertheless, I think it is worth considering that when some of us decide not to play because we have a sore knee or a semi-torn ligament or even a bruised spleen, we dishonor the memory of Frank Chance, who continued to play inning after inning, despite being clearly targeted for execution by a cabal of ruthless Yankees. No, we can no longer prove what we know in our hearts, but we can acknowledge Frank's courage. Therefore, there will be a game this Saturday at Noon at Kleeberger North, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning. So make that commit. Do it for Frank Chance, America's Ben Gay poster boy for the Progressive Era....Raymond
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