Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Lessons From the Diamond

Tonight, I was given a reprieve from what has become my usual twice-a-week James 1:9 experience.

You see, sometime around the end of April, two of my fellow B.C. workers had the clever idea of fielding a Bryan College softball team to compete in a local league through May and June. By my experience, finding enough interested players to compete together as a team can be quite a task, but surprisingly some 15 players committed to playing every Monday and Thursday evenings for two months. So where does James 1:9 come into play, you may be asking. Well, a look at the reference reads like this:

"The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position."

See, Dayton has been known for years as a hotbed for softball, where disgruntled middle-age men that once had visions of making it out of Dayton and into the big leagues take out their frustrations on a bloated baseball that, contrary to its name, is anything but soft. But even I, as a former local sports writer, had no idea exactly how competitive the league would be.

I could tell early on in the season that this was not just your average social softball league but was more like playing paintball with guys holding real guns. Early in the first game, a baserunner from the other team narrowly missed colliding with our firstbaseman trying to beat out a throw. "What am I supposed to do, huh! Tell me what I am supposed to do when he's standing like that! What am I supposed to do, damnit!" the man yelled at the umpire, nearly breaking into tears. In fairness to him, the firstbaseman was a tad bit in his baseline path and even admitted to the umpire, but the umpire, probably peeved that a 35-year-old, beer-bellied father of three was crying like a baby in a recreational league softball game, called the runner out anyway.

Let me just say that the Bryan College softball team is just a tad bit behind in its group chemistry and passion compared to these other teams. We've yet to have an outburst like the aforementioned man, and some of the teams we've squared off with have played together as a team for five years or more. That's right...these guys keep their same teams each year. They probably hold practice and run windsprints, for crying out loud. They even wear baseball pants and chew tobacco!

Consequently, James 1:9 has come into play several times over the last few weeks for myself. Instead of taking pride in wins, we take pride in playing hard. Instead of 1-2-3 innings, we pat each other on the back when the other team only scores five runs in an inning. Instead of applauding diving catches on line drives, we applaud each other for getting out of the way of that hotshot that would have "totally taken your leg off, man!" Ah, life is all about perspective...and counting the cost.

So it was with some deal of relief when I heard that our game had been forfeited because our coach had mistakenly told us the wrong time for the game. But after deeper thought, I realized that our opponent was the team that we actually have a really good chance of beating (that's right, I haven't witnessed a win yet, though I hear the first game of the season we won when I was out of town), and our next opponent is none other than the team that left the biggest mark on us this season.

On that fateful night, the other team put up twenty, 2-0, one less than 21, runs against us before the end of the first inning! Everyone on the team batted around at least three times, with the exception of a hairy man with glasses that simply stood beside first base, laughing the entire time like a lunatic (I found out later on that he never plays but is more like the team's cheerleader or good luck charm or something). If we pulled the outfield in, the batter knocked the ball over the fielders and sometimes the fence. If we played deep, they'd hit it over the infield for hits. At one point, I, playing third base, somehow saved my manhood while simultaneously gloving a hard hit ball that felt like stopping a cannonball, but by the time I had cocked my arm back to throw the runner out at first, he had safely reached base, almost as if he had a teleporter that took him directly from the batter's box to the bag. The game ended after three innings, since one team (I'll let you guess which one) trailed by more than 20 runs.

Later that night, I leaned against my truck, took a deep breath and stared up into the sky, replaying the short, yet oh-so-lengthy massacre that had just taken place. "What are you doing," Kati asked me, doing her best to hide a smile that had been breaking across her face throughout the whole ordeal. "Oh, I'm just letting this all sink in," I replied. "You know, it's sort of cathartic."

"The sting of defeat," I thought to myself, "is sort of like a really hard massage that hurts like heck when it's going on, but soon afterwards, that slow burn sets in and the muscles begin to lounge about in a drunken state of euphoria. Yes, this will be used for good. It's not a bad thing to lose like this once in a while to humble me.............what the heck am I talking about? This is awful."

If you want to learn about gravity, go jump off a building, if you want to understand shoes, find some broken glass and walk on it wearing nothing more than socks and if you want to learn humility, play recreational league softball in East Tennessee.