He Crouches to Conquer
This Saturday I gave the best athletic performance of my life. The Mark Bar softball team had already secured a victory via forfeit, but the remnants of the conceding squad rounded up a few stragglers and felt like playing a scrimmage. Gracious in victory, we agreed. I was penciled in at catcher, pretty much as an afterthought. I used to catch in Little League and have not since then, but I must say that it's a lot like riding a bike--if riding a bike forced you to hunker down while having balls thrown at your crotch. I regained my crouch very easily, and actually caught 90 percent of the pitches thrown to me (in a game of boozy adult softball, this is a more than acceptable success rate). I was the second half of an extremely awesome double play--the batter popped out to the deep infield, and a runner on third decided to test our second baseman's arm and my glove by tagging up. I fielded an excellent throw and tagged the runner out with centimeters to spare.
But then came the ultimate face rocking moment. Tie game, top of the tenth, man on first and one out, and I step up to the plate. I'd already gone two-for-three with some decent cuts, but I had trouble hitting the ball out of the infield. This turn, I decided to open up my stance, thinking I was fancy and could do something like that. This was kind of like bringing your own professional grade cue in a velvet lined case so you could play pool in your friend's basement. Well, I guess I am fancy, because I knocked the pitch way down the third base line for a long, long hit. Keep in mind this is a public park, and there are no fences, so one can not hit a home run per se. You can only hope you hit it into the adjacent field, or that the ball keeps rolling into someone's picnic blanket or hollowed-out barrel barbecue. My hit was as close to a clean home run as you can get under these conditions--it sails far and long, then chops away with several big bounces. I thought home run all the way. The left fielder had a good arm, so he had a marginal shot at throwing me out at the plate, but I was running so I hard that I actually scaled the backstop after coming home. Later, we tacked on another run, and set 'em down in the bottom half to pull off a come-from-behinder.
I used to be a very good catcher, if I do say so myself, at least at the Little League level. But at some point I stopped hitting, and I couldn't progress up the ranks. I still don't know why. I think it was a combination of a) worsening eyesight abetted by intense reading; b) onset of overweight-itude that plagued most of my adolescence; and c) the classic batting ailment: overthinking. Always at the back of my brain, however, I've thought that it's something I should have pursued, at least for fun. I let self-consciousness and nerd defeatism keep me from doing something I really enjoyed--neither the first nor the last time this would happen.
Any illusions I might have about getting called up to the big show have been completely erased by the searing pain in my legs. Even though I'm in better shape right now than I have been for years, none of the exercises I do prepare me for crouching for ten innings. When I sit down or get up, I have to brace myself against something sturdy. When I walk, it takes me fifty paces to get up to a decent speed--if you can imagine trying to pedal a Big Wheel with a completely scuffed front 'tire', that's how my pins are operating right now. At the same time that this pain is a mark of my hard work, it is also the death knell for a naïve childhood fantasy. Perhaps if I stuck with it and stayed in shape, I could have caught for longer than I did. But it's a young man's game, and my legs tell me that I'm already too old for it.