Softball Season

The warm weather, the wild winds and the violent thunderstorms indicate that spring is arriving and with that, baseball and softball games.  This year is special because my 5 year old granddaughter will be playing on a team for her first time ever.  There is NOTHING like watching kids play for the first time, running the wrong direction, chasing the ball in a pack, fighting each other over the ball and hitting umpires with tossed bats.  It's even more fun now with the pink helmets and princessy batting gloves!  I can't wait!  Her first game is Saturday.

So it's only natural on this Flashback Friday as I delve into my past, that I think about all the church, neighborhood and school softball games of yester-year.  My family, in particular, was never crazy athletic.  I played tons of sports, but didn't really master any or even get off the bench much.  In baseball or softball, a Maslar would be strategically placed in right field.  We called it the Charlie Brown Curse.  We played ball like Charlie Brown.  The opponent always had a Lucy.  It was humiliating.


When I was a kid, church ball was big.  All my friends' dads played ball.   They often played at 5-Mile Point and we kids could play in the creek nearby.  We could hear the swack of the wooden bat hitting the ball and the thump of a pop-fly land in a leather glove.  And often, the sound of much laughter and screaming.

My father has short legs.  Running the bases, he often looked like the cartoon images -- a body trunk with just swirly marks underneath for rotating legs.  So many times dad's trunk got going faster than his legs and down he'd go.  Or the legs would get tangled and down he'd go.

There was one game where dad had a great hit, ran the bases like crazy, got to third base and fell down, legs still spinning, popped back up and continued running.  Towards the outfield.  He was making up for lost time, but in the wrong direction!  We screamed and carried on, got him to turn around and he STILL got a homerun out of it.

Not all of our screwups were funny, some were painful.  At another church game, Dave Crissell hit the ball, threw the bat and hit my sister right in the head, she was KO'd.  In retrospect, mom shrugs, "she was alright after a few hours." 

I can remember pitching in my middle school years.  I took a line drive right in the gut.  It was back to right field for me.  I'm still scared to death of the ball.

So yeah, the Charlie Brown Curse?  It's in my blood.