Rain, blood, and laughs

Kind of a weird night on the softball diamond last night. I arrived way early, as the last time I had a shift at Capitol Hill on St. Patrick's Day parking was so impossible I didn't find a space for an hour and then had to pay at a commercial lot and beg the league to reimburse me for it. Wasn't going to let that happen again, so I factored in extra time. Of course, this year was different—it was rainy and cold, for one, but also it's a lot harder to be festive in 2026. So the crowds at bars were not what they were. Nevertheless, parking was worse than is typical and I had to park blocks away, but I still had gobs of time.

I spent some of the excess checking in with Marty on the phone and looking in on the WBC finale game, which was in progress (yay for Venezuela beating the jingoist Team USA, too bad it wasn't an 18-2 shellacking). Then we set to work. I had a good group for the first game, and as always I was greeted by name as I approached the field. (It is nice to be everyone's favorite.) The weather made things somewhat unpleasant, but the flip side at Cap Hill is that rain also keeps soccer hooligans away, or at least more subdued, and the only people I had to shoo away were some very accommodating LARPers who were content to stay in deepest left field.

Game one saw some lively back-and-forth both with runs across the plate and with words in the form of a lot of good-natured banter between players and me. It ended in what would have been an exciting 16-15 finish if not for some minor injury drama in the final frame that turned it into a more sedate 16-15 finish. Nothing really serious, a hard grounder to someone's ankle that required giving him some assistance to get off the field and undoubtedly left a nasty bruise. It also delayed things for a while, so when a player from the upcoming game three stopped by on her way to a pregame meal at a local bar and asked when I thought her game would really start—knowing as she does that Cap Hill schedules almost never stick to time—I told her "probably 9:45." This was as we were starting game two, with one team I like to draw and one I have mixed feelings about. We were moving along OK until the bottom of the second, when on a play at home plate the catcher took a one-hop throw from the outfield that glanced off the tip of her glove and into her face. She went down in a heap bleeding profusely from a split lip. Ultimately she left the game with her husband and teammate to go to urgent care for a couple of stitches, which left her team with just seven players—insufficient for a legal game. So that game ended right there in a forfeit, her team dispersed, and the other squad and I just hung around for a while as that team had a doubleheader and was awaiting their opponent for game three to show up. Only I had just told their representative that we'd probably start late.

Fortunately, another of that team wandered by on his way to the bar and we corralled him to explain the situation, hoping he would find his entire team at the bar and they would come back to the field sooner than later. Not to be, though. We had a good 45 minutes or an hour to kill. Some of them practiced on the field, I hung out with some of the rest in their dugout under a tarp talking about the WBC and other stuff. When we got going again it was less bantery and more okay-I'm-tired-of-being-in-all-this-rain, but still fun and saw the ultimate winners come back from being down 7 in the first to make a game of it and eventually pull ahead to victory, thanks in large part to some great play by their first-basewoman. As a fellow first baseman, I appreciated (and envied) the skills.

Then this morning I received a rather thoughtless text from the league regarding something trivial from last Sunday, when I had two games of four on the schedule (the prior two being handled by someone else, whom I am pretty sure did not get a similar text despite identical circumstances), which annoyed me and added to the growing pile of less-than-pleasant interactions I've had with the league office this year. I swear, if not for the players letting me know how they feel I'd have quit by now. And it's a good thing I haven't, because when I calm down and think it through I realize these interactions are all most probably because of poor communication within the office and get distorted when they get down to me. (To be clear, it's not that today's missive was particularly bad, it wasn't, and in isolation I'd think nothing of it; it's just that these things are cumulative and each time they erode my patience a little bit more.) We had different personnel there when I started this gig and there was a changing of the guard, as it were, a bit more than a year ago when it comes to field staff liaisoning. Have to keep all that in mind when this shit goes down.

At some point I need to update the Cap Hill Softball Bingo Card to include some new squares: Foul ball off the light pole, threats from misogynist spectators, and cop on a bullhorn to vagrant elsewhere in the park saying "Wake yo' ass up." The latter happened last night.