OLD GUY SOFTBALL [Sat, 2-22-25]

 BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—OLD GUY SOFTBALL [Sat, 2-22-25]

 

Today “my” Cincinnati Reds start spring training games. The training itself started Feb. 9, when pitchers and catchers reported. Why those guys first? It takes pitchers a little longer to get into game shape, and what’s a pitcher without a catcher?

In the Rocking Chair League, pitchers didn’t even need warmup, since they threw about two miles per hour, and catchers didn’t even bother to crouch. They stood as far behind home plate as the umpire would let them, caught [maybe] the ball on the bounce, and then bounced or rolled the ball back to the pitcher.

Bill Holada’s obit was in the paper recently. Bill was manager of the Fossils team in the Rocking Chair League. It was an old guys league. Over fifty. I played third base. We thought we were old, enough to be named Fossils. That was almost forty years ago. Little did I know what it meant really to be a fossil!

I played third base because I was the new guy on the team, and we already had a first baseman, my usual position. He was Bubba, from Alabama, and he was even taller and slower—the main attributes for a first baseman--than I. That left third base for me, because nobody wanted to play third, because it really was “the hot corner.”

In an old guys league, 90% of the players bat right-handed. It was slow-pitch, so they had time to wind up to hit the ball as hard as possible. That meant screaming grounders down the third base line. After a game, I’d be bruised all over—arms, legs, chest—because we played on a field that had experienced no dragging or raking in thirty years. Every ground ball hit a divot or a clod and bounced anywhere but into my glove.

I was backed up by Kenny Zike, who played left field. Kenny was my neighbor and friend and fellow cancer survivor. He was also the fire chief, and whenever a fire siren sounded, he took off. Sometimes the fire truck would come down the street beside the softball field and he would just jump on. It was a professional fire department, not volunteer, but Kenny being the chief, he needed to be at every fire. So, in times of fire, I had no backup.

That was when we’d look on the bleachers for anyone in an orange shirt. That was the color of our uniforms. Well, our uniforms were just t-shirts, in the proper color, with the team name on the front and the player name and number on the back.

Why we needed shirts with names and numbers, no one knew, but we got a new shirt every year, so when our granddaughter was born, I ordered my new shirt in her size and with her name. Manager Holada assigned her the # 1.

The other teams had names, but I can’t remember them. We never used team names, anyway. We referred to teams as light blue or dark blue or green, whatever the t-shirt uniform color was. If a team was missing a player, like Kenny during a fire, anyone with the right color shirt would fill in. I loved to play, and on game days there would be three games in a row, so I would pack t-shirts of every color in my gym bag and go early so that I could get into more games.

That’s the kind of league it was-casual. The home team was responsible for keeping score. That job fell to some wife who was there for the late afternoon game, with the hope of getting her husband to take her for a burger after the game so she didn’t have to cook. One game we were changing sides when one of the guys asked what the score was and what inning we were in. The score-keeper wife said, “Oh, I don’t know. I stopped keeping score a long time ago. It was just too much trouble, and you looked like you were having fun…”

Bill Holada wasn’t just our team manager and right fielder, he was the creator and commissioner of The Rocking Chair League. I’ll be forever grateful to him. It was the kind of time where we had so much fun we didn’t need to keep score.

There were Republicans and Democrats on that team. There were atheists and evangelicals. There were professionals with doctorates and high school drop-outs. But you played with and for anyone with the right color shirt, and you didn’t even worry about the score.

John Robert McFarland