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October 01, 2005
Strike Three!
It has now been established that one can strike out in slow-pitch softball. Today was the annual softball tournament of Beta Alpha Psi (the business students' honor society that I joined this fall for networking purposes). I was hoping for as little exposure to actual play as possible, but as it turned out, they pretty much put everyone out in the field and ran through everyone in the batting order, so I had no choice but to actively participate.
I actually acquitted myself pretty well with the leather (that being an ancient Spalding Mike Andrews Professional Model that I dug out of the garage). I was playing center field, more or less, and caught a couple of fly balls while not making any errors -- aided considerably by the young guy in left, who'd yell "You're under it" as a navigational aid. Without help, I'd have been clueless.
However, I was amazingly awkward with the bat. First time up, I swung and missed a couple of times, or maybe fouled one off. I thought to myself, no, this is not possible -- you can't strike out in slow pitch! Somehow, though, with two strikes, I connected and lined a single to center, and eventually scored (probably on some errors, I forget exactly what happened). Second at-bat, however, I did actually strike out, and third and last at-bat, flied out to right-center.
The tournament used to be more of a competitive event -- the teams were students, faculty, and the accounting firms who came up for the weekend for recruiting/schmoozefest events. However, my tax prof says that it started to get dangerous -- the accounting firms would stack their teams with players from their corporate leagues, and things started to get altogether too serious, complete with collisions at the plate leading to injuries, etc. One year, a fight almost broke out. So this year, they assigned everyone to teams, combining each group on each team, so it was more of a social event -- which, of course, is the whole purpose of the thing.
But when you haven't swung a bat in 15 years, you can look pretty silly at the plate!
Posted by Urbie at October 1, 2005 04:59 PM