Greetings From Ft. Myers

After an early morning flight from Newark, we landed in Ft. Myers to find a bright, blue sky awaiting us. Unfortunately, it's also a tad chilly, with temperatures in the low to mid 60s. That's not too bad when we'll be playing, but it puts the screws on any beach action. We might do a little running (or not) and then watch the Florida-Tennessee basketball game tonight.

As I look ahead to the week of baseball coming up, I can't help but think back to my brief baseball career as a youth. I played one year of organized baseball in my life, sometime in middle school for a City League team, which was a rival of the local Babe Ruth League. Gainesville didn't have a Little League then. In any case, I have 4 distinct memories of playing baseball:

1) Pitching in one game, likely in middle relief because I begged to pitch so much that I probably annoyed my coaches, I remember throwing what can only be described as the most perfect curve ball ever thrown. Never mind that I did not (and still do not) know how to throw a curve ball, this pitch came over the plate in a perfect 12-6 motion, starting up near the hitter's eyes and then completely falling off the table into the lower half of the strike zone. The poor kid didn't know what hit him and quite frankly, neither did I. On the next pitch, he grounded weakly to me and I tossed over to the first baseman to get out of the inning. It is the only memory I have of pitching, though it's quite likely that I was an otherwise horrible pitcher, or else I would've been summoned to break off the old Uncle Charlie more often, no?

2) The only at-bat I remember is an opposite field double that bounced once and hit the right-field fence. I must have closed my eyes when I swung, or done some other ridiculous action, because when I got to second base, the opposing team was laughing at me. I couldn't hear what they were saying to me, so I just shrugged and pretended that they had never seen a ball hit so far in their lives and thus they could only throw their hands up and laugh in despair when facing such an imposing hitter and that I must have been called upon to be their God.

3) In my senior year of high school, I tried out for the baseball team. I had been on the varsity soccer team my sophomore and junior years, but I knew I wasn't going to get an opportunity to start and I had just been elected North Florida Council Vice President of my youth group (BBYO), so I didn't have time to play soccer in the winter anyway. But as spring rolled around, I got the baseball jones. By this time, I hadn't played baseball in 5 years and was competing with varsity and junior varsity players for a roster spot. Of that experience, I only remember two moments: 1) been yelled at for sitting down when proper protocol was to "take a knee" and 2) hitting an inside-the-park home run to deep center field (whatever that means). Needless to say, that fleeting display of power and speed were not enough to overcome my inexperience and my instinct to plant my ass in the grass when told to relax.

4) Perhaps my most traumatic experience as a baseball player didn't even take place on a field. When I was in middle school, my parents found a gift certificate to a local bookstore, on which I had crossed out my own name and written in the name of our 17 year-old neighbor Chris across the street. Of course, my mother thought that it must've had something to do with drugs, and my refusal to tell her that I had in fact hoped that he would buy me some dirty magazines did not serve to assuage her fears. I had a baseball game that night and she threatened to keep me home if I didn't tell her the truth. Here I was, a lonely and woman-obsessed thirteen year-old faced with a choice of missing out on a baseball game or suffering the humiliation of telling my mother that I not only wanted dirty magazines, but that I also wanted to implicate the neighbor (who had already refused the mission) in my filthy conspiracy. Finally, we hit upon a solution in which I would call my brother at college and tell him what I was up to and then he would judiciously give my mom the Yay or Nay as to whether I should be burned at the stake for my crimes. Not that telling my big brother that I was some kind of pervert was my idea of a compromise, but I was left with no choice if I had any hope of playing baseball that night. So, I told him I had wanted Chris to buy me the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue. In my adolescent mind, I felt that this represented enough of a version of the truth, while still maintaining my dignity in my taste for pictures of scantily-clad women. I then suffered an awkward (how much more awkward it must have been for Adam!) lecture about how "women aren't everything" and that I should "focus on other things in life." With all parties satisfied that I was not a juvenile threat to society of my family's honor, I did make it onto the ballfield that night. I was the one with the bright red face.