Slow goes it

Resslin' Around by Casey Ressler

This weekend at Bumpus Ballfields, you'll find slow-pitch softball action from morning to night, as the Wayne Gore Memorial Tournament gets in full swing. For the first time in years, my team isn't playing, due to a couple of our players being on vacation. After our last tournament experience, however, it's probably for the best.

There are usually two types of softball teams -- serious teams, and then those teams comprised of players looking for a reason to drink some beer and hang out on a week night, under the guise of athletics. Our team falls into the latter, but we don't actually think of ourselves as athletic.

The lowest divisions of softball are always the most fun. In the Valley, that's Coed E, the league my team plays in simply because there isn't a coed F in the alphabetically organized league. Games end with scores like 20-19.

On every coed E team, there are usually one or two young whippersnappers who haven't yet given up on the hope that one day, they'll be discovered by the New York Yankees, as if the Yankees need a 22-year-old guy who throws wicked backspin on underhanded pitches to 50-year-old women who have opposite field power. On every coed E team, there are also one or two people who are about 50-50 whether they're going to show up from game to game, and if they do, there's only about a 15-percent chance they'll show up sober. If you are one person short, as we usually are, those are bettin' odds that are hard to turn down.

The games themselves are works of art. Basically, 10 people -- five women and five men -- wander out from the dugout and assume a position on the diamond. On average, about six of the people are praying the ball doesn't get hit to them, which the other team senses like sharks swarming around blood. The other four people then have to sit there for an excruciating inning in which every single hit goes directly to those six people.

Evidently, appearance is everything in slow-pitch. Some players go all out -- they've got the matching socks, batting gloves in all colors, top of the line cleats and bats that cost the equivalent of the gross national product of Ghana.

My general rule of slow-pitch softball is that you are going way overboard if you spend more than an average of $12 per week, which is roughly the amount you'll spend on a 12-pack of beer, a bag of ice and a tube of IcyHot, and perhaps a roll of duct tape that you can use to tape last year's cleats back together for another season.

I'd rather have expensive beer after the game than use an expensive bat during the game, but that's just me. I'm not holding out for the Yankees -- I'm waiting for the Phillies to discover me out there in right-center field.

Our team, sponsored by Blockbuster, played in the season-opening tournament a few weekends ago, and some of us are still trying to stretch out our hamstrings as a result. In fact, that tournament was the first time I actually felt my hamstrings since the last tournament we were in, last summer.

This year, we won our first two tournament games, which unmercifully meant we had to play at least two more in the heat. We managed to blow a lead in the semifinals and then get routed 18-2 to end the tournament. We stopped short of throwing our gloves in the air with delight -- we couldn't move our arms at that point in the afternoon -- but there were full coolers and hot grills which demanded our immediate attention, so our elimination wasn't exactly met with tears.

Our winning delayed the start of our team barbecue by at least two hours -- you have to have your priorities in life, right?

Casey Ressler (valleylife@frontiersman.com) is the Valley Life editor. His one lifetime home run leaves him 754 short of Hank Aaron's record.