As my team rallied hard in the bottom of the 9th, Enid's side fought like a pack of rabid maternal wildebeests defending their young, and in so doing, they held on to a breathtaking 12-10 victory. It was a taut, complex and unpredictable match from beginning to end, and no single player personified it's deeply nuanced contradictions better than the Capeman himself.
I suppose that Anthony's infield performance was somewhat inauspicious, for while it's true that blowing nine easy balls in a row made him the greatest human sieve in American history, this tactic was not particularly helpful for my own side's defenses. Yet when the Anthonator was placed in deep centerleft, he suddenly found his inner eyeball, and thus one seemingly uncatchable blast after another was snagged with clarity, poise and frightful Hooveresque suction. The sieve was now a God.
Unfortunately, Tony appeared to misunderstand the somewhat ephemeral nature of his sudden deistic stature. Indeed, with two out, two on and my team trailing by two in the bottom of the 9th, the Capester smashed a brilliant line drive straight up the middle, but then inexplicably darted right into Raul's waiting tag-out at 2nd, thereby killing our rally, ending the game and casting a deeply muddled light on his ultimate contributions to the course of aerobic events. For more than any single player in our entire community, Anthony is that deeply misunderstood athlete who is both Hero AND Goat—Yes, the legendary Scottish Hego of early Shakespearean cricket.
In any case, I am well aware that next Sunday is July 2nd, which means that next Tuesday is July 4th, which means that a lot of you will be celebrating a long four-day weekend in some tedious snake-infested national park in the middle of nowhere. Fine, be that way. Indeed, I wasn't even going to organize a game this weekend, but then I started thinking about what the Founding Fathers would've wanted me to do, and it kind of made me think about what we, as a King-George-the-3rd-hating-people, have actually done. OK, now look, I'm obviously not going to start quoting myself as if my words had the same resonance as those majestic lines from that sublime 230 year-old Declaration of Effervescence, yet I would gently remind you of what I wrote to all of you just one short year ago (as well as, for what it's worth, every year between 1997 and 2004):
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As the 4th approaches, I am reminded of the intense pressures that Jefferson, Adams and Franklin must have felt when they decided to pen that most momentous of definitive divorces, their very lives at stake as cunning little fish-and-chips eating British troops scampered throughout the Pennsylvania bush. These intrepid and indefatigable revolutionaries would have no doubt given anything to play an exciting game of softball, but stuck as they were in the 18th century, they had to settle for yeoman farming and really boring arguments about the nature of mercantilism. I think you see my point. Make that commit. Do it for the children. Do it now. Indeed, the line from Alexander Hamilton to Jackie Robinson to all of you is the very essence of the American experience....
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God, I still get teary-eyed just reading that, which I suppose means that I’m just the type of guy to whom I was trying to appeal. Ironic. And therefore there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11:00, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning…Ray
PS: Please note that I will be out of town all of next week, in a distant land, far, far away. So if you truly want a game on July 9th, somebody will need to talk to me this Sunday or Monday in order to work out the organizational details. Regardless, I myself will most likely not be sending out a group email, but all is not lost, for the following Sunday, on July 16th, we will be having both a game and our first barbecue of the season. Yummy.
6/30/06
Softball: Equal
Dear People,
There will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11AM, and as of now, it is full. As always, please contact me ASAP if you committed and need to cancel, and feel free to contact me later for news of open slots.
This week’s field fee is just $3, and that rate is guaranteed no matter how objectively pitiful your level of play…Raymond 845-7552