226/365 History: The Softball Team

Colleen O'Toole asks me if I want to play softball with some other women at church. She mentions April, Bonnie, and Melody, a trio of sisters I'm only vaguely aware of. Jessica and Nicole I know better. I stand there in the back of church writing a check for the scrip we buy for grocery stores--the parish gets a kick back, or, rather, a donation. And thoughts run through my head: I hate softball. Softball is a version of group penance. I got it, I got it, wham. Eh, don't worry about it, facial wounds bleed a lot.

"Sure," I tell her.

We go to practice in the park. We suck. Sr. Vanda is on our team. She can't run. Nobody wants to be catcher. I'm drafted, which is fine with me actually because it's slow pitch and I fear outfield.

The first game, we arrive at Forest Park to get ready. We have helmets and bats from the grade school sports locker. Our uniforms are t-shirts from a bar. Assuming most teams were parent organizations and parishes, we didn't think anything about this. Then we met the opposing team. They had the full polyester getup, hats, the tight pants and the shirts with the cursive across the front like a high school boys team. I remember these from back then, in fact, tight pants and cute boys...anyway, they are not cute on these women. These women have brought their trophies. They display them on the picnic tables around their fans. Our fans are our husbands and a few bored looking children (mostly O'Tooles).

They feel bad for me and let me borrow their catcher's mask, even though we aren't supposed to even need one.

They have one player with an artificial leg.

They beat the pants off us. 20 to 1. We're done in the 4th inning or something shameful like that. They pretend to shake our hands graciously afterward, drinking their Bud Lites and taking off the sweatbands.

"You ladies should invest in some bats," they point out as Bonnie loads our grade school surplus bats into a beat up canvas bag. "Spend more on your bats than you did on your socks."

Jessica tells me later at the bar that she spoke to one of them during an inning when she was miraculously on base. They thought they'd joined a competitive league, not a church picnic league. "Bullshit," Nicole says. "They can read the brochure as well as anyone else."

"Yeah, they were there to smash us," I agree.

But maybe not. We did go on that season to lose every game, after all. Group penance indeed.

Plus that's when I met Lynn, that first night in the bar. She made my skin crawl even then.