Category Archives: play

Because I carry the equipment bags and make out the line-ups and provide ad hoc and amateur cognitive behavioral therapy interventions, I possess awesome power within the Free Play Softball League leadership, you know, the one I convened prior to this season. This power may be trumped by a harsh god with his passive-aggressive approach to guiding the weather. Due to this more powerful deity I worked out parameters with m=the co-leaders for starting softball games in the late fall, past the baseball world series. The conditions must be dry, the field playable, and, temp in the forties.

Still, in the face of such gods the free players turned out on a windy rainy Sunday morning. Not in force, here at the end of the season, (in which the league has expanded its base of regulars by the most new and second/third year players in years,) but turning out nine players. Sadly, once I got there a half hour late, summoned by a text, the drizzle intensified.

Smiling, I walked up to Francis and told him,

All these players are irrepressible.

He said, You can play in this, we just don’t have enough players.

Later Dave told me, “we used to play games in much worse conditions.”

Indeed. It is fitting in this 2017 Free Play Softball League season that the original spark of the league made its late season claim. We’ve played through falling snow once upon a time.

The assembled players convened a batting practice as the curtain started to very slowly unfold.

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Another beautiful day for our Sunday Free Play Softball game. The weather has been mild all summer and now is unseasonably warm in the early fall. We’ll keep playing until the increasing cold knocks our numbers below twelve.

What is arrogance?
It is being oblivious and insensible to what is essential,
as the ice is unaware of the sun.
When ice becomes conscious of the sun, it doesn’t last
long: it warms and melts and flows away.

— Rumi; Mathnawi V:1941-1942
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski

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A 20-8 lead was almost completely vaporized by a nine run rally in the bottom of the seventh inning. I believe the largest comeback for a win was nine runs. Several years ago there was a fourteen run comeback that tied and ended the game, and, I vaguely recall a ten run comeback that tied the game but led to a one run loss in an extra inning.

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We’ve managed to put together enough free play personnel to play half field. Players who were regulars during the season lose their stones and are gone, while the hard core core remains.

It seems we’re all going to vote for Hillary–so, there’s that!

I dislike half field, but I’ve been in the worst slump of my softball career over the last few months, and it hasn’t been because for half of those game right field has been absent as a target due to playing the half field. Meanwhile, my declining skills are so apparent as a fielder in the field that all I can do is own it. Still, the golf course, my athletic Plan B, remains far away from consideration.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats, 1795 – 1821

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Stacy

Two notes: yesterday the game was won when a throwing error on a successful force out at home allowed three runners to score in the top of the first extra inning. This is the kind of unusual stuff that helps make Free Play Softball Great, again.

I’ve mentioned before that as far as I know, in our core group of twenty or so players, two have earned pages in Wikipedia, an astronomer, and an educator/theorist, (the “DaVinci” in his field.)

But, I will put my money on Andre being the most interesting man in our world. He is a chef, actor, director and wicked left handed pull hitter.

Andre, one of his daughters, grandkids

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Packing up on a very hot day, after a fourth one-run outcome in a row.

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