Beisbol

When I was younger, I used to really like baseball. Somewhere around the age of 14, I started to lose interest. Maybe it was I stared to like track (talk about a difference in sports – One you always run, the other hardly), or maybe everybody around me was getting bigger and stronger and I was, well, skinny. Nothing showcased this better than me trying to be a catcher. I stared to catch at 11 and by 14 it was the only position that I enjoyed playing. One problem – I had a noodle arm. A walk or a single was pretty much a double unless you moved like my old Ford Festiva.

Anyhow, I quit playing at 15 and other than playing a year of intramural softball my senior year in college, baseball was restricted to seeing a couple MLB games a year and fantasy baseball. That has all changed over the past couple weeks.

When I first got to my site, I gravitated to the basketball court. After a couple weeks the games became pretty good and fun. That came to an abrupt halt one day when a water tank started to be built adjacent to the court and in the process cluttering the court with junk and making it unplayable.

Without basketball, I turned my attention to the baseball field. One problem. It appeared that the field hadn’t been touched in a couple years as evidenced by the weeds that had run rampant on the field. A few weeks back a group of people got together to clear the field. Using machetes, half the field was knocked down. However, that process became tedious and eventually it was decided to just burn down the rest of field. Well it worked. Kinda. Now the infield has more bad hops than a can of Schlitz. (I wish I was good enough to come up with that line, but I stole it from Joe Posnanski) While the outfield is in even worse shape as my last week my face was nearly mangled by an errant hop.


The view from home plate.


The outfield. I guess it is in better shape than old Yankee Stadium.

But you know what? The games have been a ton of fun. Each day around 5:00 a game starts. They last four innings and the winner stay on to face the next team. All ages plays which leads, in the long run, to a lot of yelling and complaining. This usually occurs over a botched play where the old player will get on the case of a young one. Of course, I have seen plenty of evidence that demonstrates they would not have likely made the play either. But that’s not here not there. And of course there are a ton of arguments over the score and the number of outs.

Next week I will go more into detail about some of the interesting moments that have occurred thus far. First, though, I got to track down and read up on baseball field up keeping.

After all, I can’t afford to have my livelihood in danger of another errant hop.