South Florida Style Softball

Last night at a place called Flamingo Park, on South Beach, my hack coed softball career was renewed all South Florida Style. It was a place with no outfield fence, but if you hit it far enough, the left fielder would have to dodge dog piles as he chased after it. There is a bona fide dog park filled with dog owning hippies at about 320 feet from the plate. Next to the field, a bunch of Latino looking people were playing soccer, half of them with out any shirts, yelling at each other in Spanish. There is a HUGE Oak tree in Left Center field, and the pitchers mound seemed way to close to home plate, but what the hell, I haven't been killed by a line drive yet, and only have a few memories of welts to my gut and legs, so I will just deal with it.

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My team is an all free agent team. We basically signed up as individuals, and they created this team for us. It is aptly named: LAST KID PICKED. So, not only did we play our first game last night we basically met everyone as well. We got beat pretty soundly in our first game, and I played horrible. It was fun though. Afterwards, about five of us went to a bar called Quarterdeck and told some lies and drank some beer, so that was good.

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We were the home team for the first game, and we put a girl at Second Base. She went out there and stood right on the bag. That always cracks me up. Before I pitched, I advised her to kind of move over a bit. She took about two steps, so now she wasn't standing directly on the bag anymore, but was about 18 inches from it. So I told her to move some more, and again, she stepped over about 18 inches or so. At this point I physically pointed to the area that a proper second baseman would line up at, and said: "Stand where I am pointing." She moved over about another 18 inches and we were golden! I figured it really doesn't matter where she stands. I doubt she will actually catch anything anyways if its hit to her, and at least if she is only 36 inches from the bag she will no doubt be able to get to it when we have to turn two.... (that's sarcasm, She certainly wasn't going to be able to throw the ball from second to first) She was fun though and she didn't seem to care that she had no idea what she was doing, In fact she had wanted to play left field, which would have been awesome, as basically that is the primary place most hack softball players hit the ball to...

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The other team wasn't all that great, it was just that we were way worse. They won 14 to 8 but it wasn't really that close. We scored about 5 of our runs in our last at bat to make it look more respectable then it really was. I was oh-ferr which is just absolutely pathetic, and even though I would occasionally do that back in my old softball life, I had a history with those guys and they knew I would come around and be my normal hitting self again, so I would stay at the top of the lineup usually. After last night I am sure I will be hitting tenth or something next week and based on the data that these guys have, that would be very proper. Its a matter of them having some bad data, or to small of a sample size.

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One more thing kind of cracked me up. When we made an infield out by getting the runner at first, and no one else was on base, the first baseman would throw it over to the second basewoman after the out, like they throw it around in the infield in real baseball. The second basewoman would sometimes catch it and sometimes not. when she did catch it she wouldn't throw it to the third baseman, but just throw it back to me, kind of defeating the whole purpose of the first baseman. She had no idea why he was throwing it to her. After about the third time I mentioned to the first baseman that maybe this was just more of a waste of time then anything cool. He laughed, and agreed with me. It was kind of funny though.

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Rick, again, I am so very grateful for the link: http://www.southfloridadailyblog.blogspot.com/