Field One Defeat

It was 9:55 AM. The umpire called me to the plate for ground rules. I hesitated, then breathed a sigh of relief. Ray's van had pulled into the parking lot, and he brought enough guys for us to field 10 for the game.

I wasn't worried about winning or losing by this point-it was the last game of a five-game guaranteed tournament, and we weren't advancing anywhere. Our opponents that morning were from the Class "A" ranks, Lawrence Trucking/Budweiser. The early morning game irritated them, but unlike us, they were ready to perform on the field. They had been at the park since 6:30, streching, taking batting practice, throwing drills, and running to stay loose.

Our team didn't prepare as well. The guys that weren't battling hangovers threw a little on the side. The rest were either lying in the bleachers shading their eyes or eating McMuffins. Some guys stretched their legs on hopes of avoiding a hammy pull, and that was about it as far as cal went for us.

I went out to home plate and met the umpire and opposing manager. The umpire's name was Chuck, an elderly man with a thin face and blue eyes that sparkled when he smiled. He wasn't tall, but his high pitched voice rang out with authority when he called balls and strikes. He'd been calling games at the park for years, and attained a high level of respect from the softball community and the park and rec. If he made a call, it had to be right. To the best of my recollection, I'd never been on the wrong side of a bad call from him in the 50 or so games I played with him behind the plate.

The opposing manager's name was Dale. He was a brute with a goatee and wraparound Oakley sunglasses. He was wearing a black cap with a red "L" on it, a white t-shirt with "Lawrence" across the chest in script, red pinstriped pants, and red Nike cleats. I might have confused his style and gear for that of a typical professional baseball player, except for the midsection. He was 6'3" or so, and I bet he weighed in around 350 or more. One look at this mound of humanity and I knew he wasn't a lead-off hitter. If he didn't hit it deep, a good arm could throw him out at first from anywhere in fair territory.

I couldn't tell if he was grunting at me during the pre-game instructions. He breathed through his nose as he stared at me like we were Mr. T and Sylvester Stallone in Rocky III. I was grateful we had enough guys to field a team, ensuring we'd get back our $50 no-show deposit. I thought about bursting into laughter when Chuck warned both teams to play clean, as I had this vision of this ape running down our catcher at any semi-close play at the plate. I went to shake his hand after the toss, and he lightly tapped it, reminding me that the game was going to be "done in 2." He marched back to his bench, announcing to the other bulls in the pen that they were hitting.

I turned to our bench. The latecomers were still lacing up their cleats. Two guys were over by their girlfriends in the stands. The rest were having a pre-game smoke behind the backstop. These were my guys. "Fellas," I shouted. "We got the field!"

* * * * *

We'd been out in the field for so long, I had forgotten where I put the book. I couldn't even remember if I had even bothered to write down a hitting order.

Steve, Ray, and Willie were huddled at the far end of the bench. Willie had done some fast-pitch in his day, Ray was our league-night pitcher, and Steve pitched whenever Ray was having trouble. All three took a turn in the first inning. They scored 17 runs on us. When we weren't kicking the ball around, they were hitting it where we weren't: In the gap, down the line, over the fence, and every place in between.

I made a diving catch for the third out, restitution for my error when the leadoff batter hit a liner at me in left. I had made that catch at least 15 times the day before. Today, I watched in horror as the ball hit the edge of my glove and rolled away. I picked it up and fired it back to the infield, the shame taking over my accuracy. The ball cleared the cutoff man, the pitcher, the catcher, the backstop, and the snackbar before landing safely on field two. Luckily, the woman's game was between innings, and no one got hurt, though it did draw some funny looks.

"I can't pitch to these guys!" wailed Willie. "They're hitting everything I got! Short, deep, high arch, flat, inside, outside, they're doing whatever they want! What do we do?" Three sets of eyes turned to me as I tried to write down a lineup. Finally, I threw up my hands and looked at the bench and told them they hit where they fielded at the start.

I turned to Willie. "I don't know, just,...you're up." I was up last, so I took the coaching duties at third, in case it was needed.

I ran past their bench on my way down there. They dressed twelve guys, and all twelve had black bat bags with a red letter "L" on the bottom. All twelve bags were lined up meticulously along the inside of their dugout, in case we'd forgotten who we were playing. The two bench guys were seated, eating bananas and drinking Gatorade. There were three coolers full of fruit and sports drinks in there, not a carbonated beverage to be found in any of them.

Willie stepped up, but before he could pitch, the catcher turned to Chuck and pointed at me. Chuck rolled his eyes and stepped out from behind the catcher and pointed to me. "Lose the glove," he said.

I shrugged my shoulders, then remembered I had stuffed my glove down the back of my pants. Luckily, my friend Tom was walking to the field for his first game, so I flagged him down and pitched it to him. He began to laugh, then started telling me about how this team crushed his the day before. There was a lot of trash-talking and poor sportsmanship from these guys, the brunt of it aimed at Tom's friend, Matt. A shortstop on the Merchants teams of years ago, he recognized these guys and began razzing them for sandbagging in a lower league tourney just for the money. When Chuck heard about it, he disqualified them from winning any money, but still allowed them to play. After that, they became more intense than ever to win and win big.

Tom continued. "You gotta give it to them. They're a great team. It's just that, well, if I had to play that intense every game just to show a bunch of beer-league scrubs how great we are, I'd rather not play at all. During our game, we had guys drinking beer and smoking ciggies between innings. Hell, Ralph was eating hot dogs! Those guys were charting every pitch, every hit, it was like they were looking for an edge, like it was the most important thing in the world to them."

I told him about the first half-inning, and he laughed, though not as loud as I expected him to. "Hey, Lenoards 5 couldn't even get an out," he said. "Chuck finally called it when he saw the leadoff guy come up for the sixth time. They were pissed. They wanted to keep going until they recorded an out. It went in the books as a forfeit, 7-0 win for them."

The conversation ended when Avery popped out to short for the third out. He tossed me my glove and continued to his field. "Good luck out there," he said. "Hey, I'll call you about next weekend."

* * * *

We lost the game, 39-2. I drove in the two runs with a line drive into the gap in right-center. They were playing five infielders and three outfielders. The center fielder cut the ball off and made a nice throw home. Had anyone other than Scott been on second, he'd have been out by four feet. As it was, his speed was just enough to beat the throw and slide in under the tag. It sent the shortstop into a tirade that almost got him ejected. Their manager, playing first, stepped in and backed the shortstop to his position, then bellered at his team, "LET'S GO! WE'RE NOT HERE TO HAVE FUN, WE'RE HERE TO PLAY SOFTBALL!"

I looked back at our bench. No two shirts matched, most of the guys wore shorts, and we had maybe four bats among us. We didn't think of what we were doing as playing softball. We were having fun. Even if the other team was thrashing us in the most unnatural way, we were enjoying ourselves. After the game, we'd be inside the beer garden, planning for an afternoon of recreation and relaxation. Some would go fishing, others would stay in the beer garden, others would grill out.

Across the field, they'd be under a tree by the soccer fields, breaking down how they could be so careless to let a bunch of scrubs get two runs off them and push them to three innings. I might thing of that intensity as what it takes to be a champion, and I might also think of that as overboard. It was a 16-team tournament, and of that, there were maybe four or five teams that weren't thrown together three days prior.

Lawrence would go on to win the tournament, but went on to three Class "A" national qualifiers without winning a game. Playing down to the level of teams like ours wasn't enough to lift them to a higher status. Tom went to one of the tourneys, and told me that by the end of their last game, fistfights were breaking out inside their own dugout.

I wanted to derive some sort of satisfaction over that news, but I felt sorry for those guys. They worked so hard to be that good, and yet they were nothing to the softball community at large. Unless they came into your little tournament and tore it up, you'd have never heard of them.

I don't blame any one factor for that, other than softball itself. It's an activity enjoyed by bar partons and avid church-goers. It was never meant to be anything more than that. National sponsors, $300 bats, and big money national tournaments were never meant to be a part of it.

We had a servicable team, nothing like them. We were together for 11 years in some rendition or another. We won a few league titles, and a couple of tournaments. Thing was, we were satisfied just being around each other. Looking back, we had more going for us than Lawrence, if only because it wasn't the end of the world if we didn't win. We had barbecues at each other's homes, we went out to eat with each other's signifigant others, we played cards at the bars with each other, and never once did we not play softball without having fun.