We were losing again. Besides our one starting pitcher, we had pretty much nothing. He didn't start this game. Instead, he is currently standing in the dugout, next to me. The game is almost over, and the pitcher has been talking with an assistant coach, who's standing outside the dugout.
"Look at those wasps," the pitcher says, "They look funny. They're digging in the dirt, they've been doing that all game."
Several small bee/wasp like creatures are landing in the dirt, then small clouds of dust are coming up.
The pitcher leans forwards over the waist high dugout wall, and spits at one of the wasps. He misses. He tries again. This repeats several times.
"You're cheating, you're leaning closer to it," the assistant coach said.
"It keeps moving," the pitcher says.
"Oh, I almost got it," he says as the game continues in front of us.
He switches to another one as that one leaves.
"There, I kind of got it."
The assistant coach takes a step or two nearer.
"Long range," he says, and spits at the wasp. He hits it directly.
"Oho! Lucky, I can't even hit it from here," the pitcher says.
He leans way out over the dugout, and spits repeatedly from directly over the wasp. It misses to the left, then the right. Then to high, too low. Finally, the pitcher heads back into the dugout, and grabs a baseball. He jumps over onto the field and whacks the wasp with the baseball.
"There. If anyone asks it was a giant hornet. It was big enough that they could have seen it all the way in the other team's dugout."
"Yeah," the assistant coach says, "or a giant tarantula."
On some teams, it might be considered bad form to be so obviously uninterested in the game's outcome.
ReplyDelete:(
They were screwing around in foul territory with wasps when your team was in the field (or hitting for that matter)???
I'm weirded out, but I've become addicted to http://thebaseballcodes.com/ and what it has to say about unwritten codes and respect.
BTW, I can't watch this without laughing--it's been my go-to picker-upper for the last week:
http://thebaseballcodes.com/2013/09/20/helton-hides-horsehide-carpenter-caught-careless/
Now, on to the writing. Have you ever read Ring Lardner's baseball stories? The first line here is worthy of Ring Lardner, as is the whole premise.
ReplyDeleteBut I don't know, Tom--I sense the same flatness here that I did in the poodle piece. Telling you I "feel" something is not much use to you perhaps: totally subjective. But I have to trust my instinct, and, I hope, that after--what?--three courses together, you would trust it at least a little too.