It’s softball season again and after a few rainouts, tonight we play our first two games of the season. Let share with you a little of my softball background. A few years ago, while I worked at The Tech Council of Maryland, the staff decided to man a softball team in a coed league. Everyone thought it was a good idea to play as a team and we all had the attitude that it really doesn’t matter who wins, as long as you’re having a good time.

When we had our first practice I quickly realized that the majority of our team had never played softball before, much less played on a team. That was still fine, remember it’s not if you win or lose.

By the time we played our first game we had a pretty goods idea how the season was going to turn out. Now most of our games were double-headers so the evenings were long commitments. T the end of the first game the score was something like 46 to 1 with us being on the short end. Losing by 45 runs isn’t a great incentive to rally thee team for the second game of a double-header.

As the season went on (a total of 18 games) some members of the team started to drop by the old water hole before and after the games. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with a bit of imbibing but showing up to the games three sheets to the wind made it pretty difficult to win a game much less getting through a game with someone on the team challenging the opposition to a fight. You can imagine how hard it was to get excited for the trouncing were getting every game.

It got so bad that we had a hard time fielding a team each night. Since it was a coed league we had to have at least five women and five men on the field. Fortunately for us we hired a 19 year-old intern who helped us to field the team. She was on the field on her first day of work; we had to stop at Target to buy her clothes and shoes to wear.

It was the last game of the season and we were 0-17. We had a chance; we were up by two runs in the bottom of the last inning. The other team knew that we had never had a win and we knew it was finally going to happen, you could feel it in the air, victory was within our reach. Until those son-of-a-bitches scored three runs off of us and that’s the way we finished the season, 0-18.

Fast forward to my church’s team. Grace Presbyterian has had a softball team for as long as I can remember. I’ve always wanted to play on the team but doing theater all of those years kept me off the field and on the boards. Last year I finally got a chance to play on the Grace team. It was halfway through the season and the team was still accepting anyone who wanted to play. The league is a men’s league and apparently Grace has been a dominating force in the league for quite some while.

Halfway through my first game with the team the manager put me in as a designated hitter. The team had never seen me take a swing or even played the field. The first pitch I drove a line drive down the left field line and took it in for a double. The next time up was a single and then the last at-bat for me was another double. I was finally having fun playing softball.

The 2007 Grace team went on to have a perfect season with no losses and we ended up winning the tournament as well. Tonight starts a new season and the slate is clean. Who knows what kind of season we have? What I do know is that we have some pretty good ballplayers on our teams and I’m proud to play a few innings with them now and ten.

If you’re in the Springfield area tonight near Wakefield Park feel free to drop by the games, 8:40 & 9:50 at field 4. Play ball!