Nerve Endings Firing Away

I have been complaining about the lack of any outdoor sports to exercise my lazy muscles. My gym routine is pretty erratic and frankly I don’t fancy the treadmill much. I long for the summer days when I could head out as soon as the sun turns off its harsh glare. the evening playtime was not only fun to run about but also to indulge in meaningless banter on the mundane happenings in our lives i.e. katta-talk. Being away from the desi ghetto and being in grad school is like a double whammy against achieving those ends.

So naturally I jumped at the opportunity to play softball at the city-level league. Srikanth, a fellow blogger (now defunct) had gathered a motley crew of American and international students some of whom me included had never played softball in their life. More Cowbell, our team named after that hilarious skit on SNL met up for the first time just a day before our first game. Of course, it helped that we had been placed in the D+ level of the league i.e. a shade above the absolute novices although now I think we would have been better off in the lowest level.

Softball, for those ignoramuses out there, is an underarm version of baseball and to make it more easier, this league was a slow-pitch version i.e. you must gently lob the ball to the batter. Now you may think, wow! that sounds like cricket practice for girls :) but as we found out later, it is not as easy as it looks. Of course, the primary motive of More Cowbell was to have fun because frankly we knew that we wouldn’t be winning any game let alone have a winning season and qualifying for the playoffs. You can imagine the ease of predicting a team’s fortunes when the first meeting we were discussing the rules of the game and making clear that it is a ‘ball’ and not a ‘strike’ if you don’t swing at a ball outside the ‘strike zone’. The team as I mentioned earlier was an eclectic mix of undergrads, grad students, and soon-to-be dads; most of whom had never seen a game of softball let alone play one. But we all had seen baseball and thought if it is easier than that, how hard can it be.

Armed with our own gloves, we practiced catch before hitting the field. A little about the catching and throwing in softball (or baseball). In cricket, you basically catch or stop the ball with any arm, leg, or shoulder and throw with your throwing arm but in softball, you catch with your left hand which is heavily gloved and throw with your right. Vice versa for the southpaws. You have to put on the glove to see how huge it actually is; seems a bit too large to catch a ball. It is almost like playing street cricket in a tuxedo; too dressy for sports. But if you have seen the body armor in American football, you know that all American sports are heavily padded. Talk about being a man!

Ah! the game. Well, although we had tons of fun and cheered our solitary run we got our asses handed to us in a royal fashion. They piled on 18 runs in the first inning and six in the second. Time prevented smashing of any most-runs records as game was called in the third inning. We dropped catches galore, threw to the wrong bases, walked almost everyone on the batting side, saw balls sail above our heads, threw balls from the outfield only to land a few feet away, and any other possible thing you could to lose a softball game. Even the umpires were enjoying themselves.

But hey, this is our first softball game. We are meeting for practice this Sunday. Hopefully, we can reduce the margin of defeat a little.