5/14/14

Softball: Principle (A Swim though the Pop-Culture Reference Pool)

Dear People,

First things first: Sa'adia made his community debut as captain with clarity, courage and conviction (two counts of felonious wire fraud), and I for one plan to never ever forget that. Still, his team stranded three game-winning runners in the bottom of the 9th, and thus they went down, and down hard, 16-15. Of course, life is a swirling whirlpool of attenuated causal abstractions, and I think we all know that. Yet having said it, I also think that good ol' Saad-eyes himself would be the first to acknowledge that talent wins games and management loses them, and so frankly, if that heartbreaking dénouement haunts him for the rest of his days, then so be it.

Sure, that's a pretty callous 'tude, and yet perhaps it's not surprising given that before the match even began, I had told Paul Horsepool that he wouldn't be able to play because he had arrived without committing and there simply wasn't a slot available. Yeah, there he stood before me-innocent, deflated and yearnful of nothing more than some basic aerobic release- and yet I was invoking the 22-Max Rule with the insensate resolve of every Kafkaesque bureaucracy from the Gulag Archipelago to the Berkeley City Department of Planning and Development.

Now look, I know what you're thinking and I think it's a fair question: Does all this savagery make me just another contemptible two-bit Mandarin monster? I honestly don't know. But what I do know is that monstrositude is a social fungus of surprising ubiquity, and I mention this because I still remember what happened in the top of the 4th. At the time, the game was tied at six with one on and one out when Ali came to the plate. Chris Fure hurled a string of familiar knuckle balls, and then with the count at 2-2, he suddenly unleashed his never-before-seen Armenian sinker with just a hint of spittle on the outside stitch!

Naturally, Ali was caught looking at the third strike, and as you can imagine, a communal gasp engulfed the field; Yeah, it was Mother's Day, for Christ's sake, and given that the Alinator herself had three young'uns at home, the sight of her walking off the plate was almost too much to bear. Chris realized what he gone done and thus awkwardly offered to walk it back with a rare 2-3 slow ball, but we had already seen the threaded rubber needle and the damage done, and as a collective people, we once again cleaved to the consistent rule of recreational law-codified, stern and, as enforced in this case, totally bogus.

The point is that it would be easy to say that my side's triumph was a pyrrhic one, steeped as it was in the ghastly ethical dilemmas that can so easily taint the feats of both individuals and teams. I get that, and yet after looking deep into my own bosom, I've concluded that there's a reason we have rules. Indeed, while it would be nice to discard them whenever they make us feel like a douche, I for one think that this league must never become a mismanaged carnival of recreational stupidity. And therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11, IF I get enough commits by this Friday noon . . .Raymond


5/16/15

Softball: A Swedish Model!

Dear People,

There will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11, and as of now there are still five slots left.

Please bring $4 for the field, which for this week only includes free and comprehensive child care, pre-school and job training as well as complete contraceptive and sterilization services for the duration of the match . . . Raymond 845-7552

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