On softball and how it turned to more than just a playground game

I always thought of softball as one of those playground games. I first saw a softball pitch when I was a young kid, walking around Admiral Kidd Park. That park was just a few minutes from my house. I saw how the field looked like. The infield was made of dirt and clay, while the outfield was grass. I thought at first that this was another example of a baseball field, until I found out that it was for a different game altogether.

Softball was an offshoot of baseball. The ball was larger, and pitches were thrown underhand. Further, there were three varieties of the game: slow-pitch, which has a very big ball, a deeper field, and no gloves needed, fast-pitch, which has a yellow ball, and was defensive oriented, and modified-pitch, which was somewhere in between the former two.

My university’s softball team played the fast-pitch variety. It’s an NCAA rule to have it be this way, and it probably is the most challenging of the three types. So I was watching the ladies take on Cal State Northridge for a three game series in two days. The first day was a doubleheader. They lost the first game, and I screamed at the ladies to wake up and get the job done. They would win the second game thanks to the heroics of one Kelly Cross. Brigitte Pagano, the pitcher who lost the first game, came right back to atone for her transgressions by winning the deciding rubber match on Sunday. On that day, one of the softball boosters gave me a shirt. On Sunday, the day of that third game, a group of kids from Los Altos Bobby Sox came over to watch. It’s a good thing they weren’t disappointed.

I suppose softball is one of those games that makes you feel like a little kid again.

Fast forward a week, and now in between watching Oral Roberts taking on the Dirtbags, the volleyball team of men finishing their home campaign against Hawaii, catching up on my IS 380 homework and blogging and drawing, I am watching the softball team take on Cal State Fullerton.

I told Ryan Kobane of the Long Beach Union Weekly that my work’s not done yet, and with the Dirtbags hogging the April dates, it’s set to be that way. We did win our last game. Could we be turning the ship around and prove that our last win against the Zot scum wasn’t a fluke?

I leave it to the schmucks who call the Blair home to figure out the answer.