Watching baseball movies makes me miss playing softball.
I started playing softball when I was in third grade. Some of the girls I played with had been in the T-ball league when they were younger to appease their fathers (who had all grown up playing baseball and needed to fulfill their own dreams of teaching their children how to throw and catch and hit and so on) and had the added benefit of learning how to hit. I learned by playing hours and hours of catch in the basement with my dad, who was SO goddamned overjoyed when I expressed an interest in playing.
(It should be noted that I was playing because every other girl in my grade was doing so and as I have never been “that girl with all the friends at her immediate disposal” - I figured it could only help me in that department. If they’d all driven off a cliff in a bus, you can bet I would have been on the short bus immediately following them.)
(Note. This is going to be a nostalgic wall of text post where I suck my own hypothetical dick a little bit about softball. If this is not what you’re into, I understand, but this is for me.)
My dad taught me how to field grounders in the winter by playing A-Ha’s “Take On Me” because it had a bouncy little beat and he figured it would encourage me to move around. “Move TO the ball,” he’d say. “Don’t wait for the ball to come to you; go TO the ball.” And so we’d practice in the basement, with me jamming my crappy plastic first-ever mitt against the tile, with him lobbing tennis ball grounders at me and A-Ha in the background. Sometimes he’d let me practice hitting in the basement, and it would stop when I’d catch the ball at a weird angle and send it into the ceiling tiles or into a light and Mom would come to the top of the stairs and check to see that everything was okay.
The first team I was on was called The Saints. I have no idea where all the names came from but the uniforms were not new. They were itchy and ploy-nylon-somethingorother and they were gross. And maroon. Also on the team was this girl Aimee, who was the daughter of one of my dad’s friends. He (Aimee’s dad) and my dad were base coaches. I was regularly placed in left field because I could actually throw the ball into the infield for a play in the event that a hit ever made it out that far in the first place. This was the way of the world until I was placed at third, and promptly turned a crappy pop fly into a double play - which is a very cool thing when you are 9 and have never played organized sports before.
At some point I expressed an interest in pitching. And the thing to remember is that when you’re a little girl playing softball, it’s slow pitch - big, lofty floater pitches that drop ever so nicely over the plate and into a waiting mitt. Slow pitch is fucking cake. Once you hit 6th grade or so, it switches to fast patch - that weird windmill shit you all remember seeing that one year when softball was a big deal in the Olympics because it was a new sport. I started out with slow pitch, and have - to my own personal credit - two perfect innings. Three batters up to bat, three batters struck out. Twice in a row. When fast pitch happened, we learned that everything I threw tended to curve to the inside of its own accord. I can’t explain how it happened but it was cool as shit.
My niche position was second base. Line drives to the face. Diving catches into the dirt. Flipping a grounder over to first base. Running into right field to be the cutoff person. I loved second base and second base loved me. If I ever get a chance to play again - in any kind of organized capacity where people actually give a shit about playing, and not just getting drunk on a baseball diamond - that’s where I’d like to be.
I’m not a tall person. Or a “hefty” person. So if I was going to hit anything, it wasn’t going to be a goddamned grand slam - even if I put my whole weight into it. Instead I learned how to aim my hits - to slap them down at the shortstop’s feet so they’d bounce into left field. The logic there, was that I’d have just enough extra time to have already passed first base by the time the left fielder made the throw (to first base).
My strength wasn’t hitting the ball. My strength came once I had gotten on base. First base is neat because you don’t have to stop once you hit it. You don’t have to slide into it. There is no slowing down because you can run right through it. My base coaches learned that I was a speedy little shit of a kid, and rather than have me stop at first - sent me right along to second, or third. Bummer for you if you were a basemen dumb enough to stand in my path because I would mow you down in a second. (I’d apologize after, but jeez. Stay out of the fucking base path, huh?)
Once I stopped using my crappy plastic “first” mitt - my dad gave me his mitt. His old mitt that he used when he played baseball, and kept oiled and soft and perfect. It had a Harmon Killebrew signature in the palm, and had no extra padding that newer mitts have. So instead I moved all my fingers over, and doubled up my pinky and ring finger into the last “finger” of the glove - leaving the index finger unused. My own mitt is at my parents’ house. I forget who’s name is in the palm, but I think my dad uses it now.
Two summers ago, I found a mitt in an empty park and kept it. And when Justin and I were (f)unemployed, we went to the beach almost every day. We brought some beers and some towels and maybe a book or two. But mostly we played catch with a tennis ball and made each other run all the fuck over Montrose Beach to catch the fucking thing (while dodging broken glass, and occasionally using a beer bottle as a bat, because we were trashy kids like that).
That summer and baseball movies make me nostalgic as fuck.
It’s weird to look back on something you were really fucking good at and wonder why the fuck you stopped doing it. If you asked me why I stopped playing softball, I’d have nothing to tell you. I loved playing. I was good at playing. My parents came to every game and were supportive as hell, and damn. I miss it.
I know my mom reads this, sometimes - so Mom? Tell Dad it’d be cool to play catch this summer. Just let him know I’m rusty as hell, okay?
This has been a wall of nostalgic, sucking-my-own-hypothetical-dick text, and I’d apologize, but I’m not that sorry. :)
