New Season, New Team, New Numbers

It felt really good to play softball again. Softball has become probably my favorite sport to play, as it seems like it’s the sport I’m probably best at (note that I didn’t claim that I’m actually *good* or anything like that), and because I’m such a fan of baseball. E-Free didn’t field a team this year, because of doubts that we’d be able to get 9 or 10 people to show up on a consistent basis every week all summer long. Sad face. So I’ve decided to be a “ringer” on Calvary Baptist’s team, as a couple PSCGers are on their team and told me about it (prior to this year Calvary didn’t have a team). Tonight was the first game I made, against Penns Valley Community Church (several people from their team recognized me from previous softball seasons because of my E-Free shirt I had on). The only person I knew on the Calvary team tonight was Dan. I hadn’t ever met the Calvary organizer before either, and he didn’t know I was coming, but he still got me plugged into the lineup.
There were 13 of us so we kept rotating in and out of the field to different positions from inning to inning (I played all four outfield positions and catcher, plus sat two fielding innings on the bench), and had a batting order 13 deep. I had one rather adventuresome catch in the outfield (as was my norm while playing for E-Free!), where the ball popped out of my glove as I was charging to get to it, but I managed to grab it out of the air with my bare hand. Phew! I also went 3-for-3 at the plate on three singles to left-center, with four RBIs (I knocked in Dan all three times I batted) and one run scored. I scraped up my knee a bit in the first inning, too. I was on 2nd base (another runner was on 1st), and a grounder was hit to deep 3rd. The 3rd baseman tried to tag me, but I barely eluded it and got to the base — but couldn’t stop. When I tried to stop I fell on the really hard infield (that’s how my knee got scraped and was bleeding most of the game) and got tagged out as I was scrambling back to the base. I didn’t exactly want to slide on that infield, and I think if I would’ve slid I might’ve been tagged out before I got to the base. Oh well. I can live with that result because I was hustling.
In any case, it was still my best offensive game in a long time (maybe ever), and I’m happy to be batting a thousand on this very young season. I also didn’t make an error, though one ball in right was rocketed over my head. Let’s see how long I’ll be able to keep it up, and I hope I made a good impression. 🙂 Oh, and we (Calvary) won 17-11, in a fun game. It was just really fun to play again. I almost certainly won’t be at next week’s game though, because I’ll be on my way back from visiting Alex in northern Michigan for the weekend! 😀