PLAY BALL!
Last night was the beginning of the Columbia Heights Men's Softball League. Opening night usually means you'll be able to see your breath, except it's likely being swept away by the freezing sleet pissing down and bent horizontal by a 30mph wind right in your mug. Nothing stings like an aluminum bat in a frozen hand.
But apparently the Lord played in a beer league at some time and saw fit to bestow sunny skies and cool calm for our 7pm tilt against the Road Apples.
By way of introduction, we're Mady's Arsenal, a somewhat grown-up version of the Bad News Bears. Don't get me wrong, this is a competitive league; several guys on the team have won state titles and played at national tournaments. The shelf behind the bar at Mady's Bowl holds several city championship trophies we've earned. It's just that we seem to have too much fun doing it, win or lose. By the amount of good-natured shit we give each other, you can't tell if we're winning or losing.
Most of the guys on the team are either family or have been around long enough to be granted honorary family status. Lots of cousins, a brother-in-law, a couple uncles. There are a couple father-son combos too.
We've been playing in the league for nearly a decade, but the softball lineage goes back much further. My dad and older uncles used to play on a VFW team where my younger uncles would be their batboys. When they grew up, my cousins and I were the batboys for their teams. When we started Mady's Arsenal, we were playing with those uncles and one of their kids was our batboy. He's now playing with us and a younger son has taken up the duties. And so on, blissfully and wonderfully and naturally...
Putting on the colors and the cleats and stepping onto the field is like taking your first breath every year. It's a moment of white light razored adrenaline and soft glove leather sentimentality packed into seven innings. The sharp smack of the ball in your glove, the grip of the tack rag, the rush of saliva from the wad of Big League Chew gum in your maw, the reintroduction to your rotator cuff, the chatter from the benches, the grind of gravel under cleats, Greg trying to hide his Pabst Blue Ribbon on the bench.
There were all there: Big Dog, Sunfish, Davey-Boy, Timmer, Bobbo, McGregor, Ricky K, Smokeless Joe, Irish, T-Bone, Captain Kirk, Kev, Johnny Pants. All the old guys trying to act younger than they felt and all the young guys trying to act older than they could. Friends and family filled the bleachers, doing inadvertent waves when the aluminum seats got too chilly for their backsides.
There was some winter rust, but we knocked it off with our bats and jumped out to a good lead. We held on to notch a 15-11 win. I even put a scorcher in the gap and recorded an in-the-park home run. While my slide into home was hardly butter smooth, it got the job done. As my reward, I got high fives from the bench and the first batch of summer raspberries.
Really minor scrapes, actually. There's still a patch on my shin that refuses to grow hair back from when I tried to leg out a triple a couple seasons ago.
After the game it was off to Mady's Bowl for pitchers of cheap tap beer and burgers and mounds of fries on wax paper in red wicker baskets. There were ashtrays tipping with butts of bad cigars and pulltabs. Olives floating in the beer and car keys and wallets set on the table. We told bad jokes and taught our batboy to yell "Batboy!" whenever we belted out the Batman theme.
The Timberwolves got back at the Lakers and the Wild closed out their series with the Avalanche with an overtime win. A complete stranger bought the entire bar a round of beer.
Some of the team were still celebrating the various victories when I climbed the stairs to the parking lot. A car next door in the Burger King drive-thru was giving off faint Van Morrison songs and the tops of the light poles looked like stars.
10:03:34 AM 
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