When I was a kid I played T-ball. Being a 5 or 6 year old, despite the balls stationary demeanor, I was often unable to hit it very convincingly. Ken Griffey Jr. at the same age probably would have knocked that shit out of the park. He’s Ken Griffey Jr., that’s what he is good at and that’s what he does. I was not. He is good at using a stick to hit a defined object in space. I am learning. Phallic metaphors aside, taking a stick like object to hit a target in space is a skill every man (some women too) should have. Truth be told we all need to know how to “hit it”. What? Have you never eaten before? If you’ve ever taken a bite of food off a fork that wasn’t being guided accompanied with airplane noises or a bib, then you know how to find an object in space. Raise your hand if you think you could keep eating even if you had no arms…thought so. I’ll bet we all could. We know what food looks like, what it tastes like, and in an emergency what it smells like. You act like you’ve never had to wrap those lips around a...lemme stop, you get the point.
My problem is that I need to take more “batting practice”. Metaphorically speaking I think I can tell a ball or a strike when I see one, and I’m less afraid to swing when I see a pitch to hit these days, but at the end of the day I still strike out more than I make contact. I love writing this right now because I’ve long said baseball was a perfect allegory for life. Look at all the baseball related analogies we have. Getting to third base, striking out, scoring!, the list goes on and on. If you couldn’t tell, think I can tell my story here completely using only baseball analogies, lets find out.
I’d been waiting to face this pitcher for quite some time. I think she’s gaining command of her fastball just now after being kind of shy and quiet in high school while I’ve just begun to get my feet under me in the batters box after taking a pitch in the ribs on my last at bat. (Yea this is gonna work perfectly!!)
She only really throws heat with a change up every now and then to mix it up but there is no breaking stuff. What you see is what you get and everyone knows it. The mindset she takes on the mound is basically this, “I’m gonna throw it and if you can catch up to the speed, you’ll connect, if not you’re going down on strikes.” What I forgot in this instance is that pitchers like this don’t wait around, they don’t try and trick you, they want to get you out. So when I stepped in to the box I expected to take the first pitch and see what I was dealing with. She told me she’d change in the car and meet me back in town. When I saw her strike one was in the glove before I even saw the pitch go by. In my head I was just giving her the benefit of the doubt, “maybe she’s always this put together I thought to myself?”
I learned my lesson from the last girl, so the conversation here was almost purely about the books I was looking to buy and HER. The Bodisattva’s birthday gift got the ok but my book on cover letters got nixed. Everything was cool and I was feeling good. She laughed when I joked, and she looked just like she does on Facebook so I’d say the count was 2-1…all even. The next pitch was a swinging strike. A very hittable pitch came as I offered this, “Tell me everything that’s happened in the last 6 years.” There I was wasting time again. Get to the point, save the small talk for later. Huge whiff. What’s sad is that it wasn’t even my homerun swing. I basically tried to take what she gave me and just shoot it in the gap to right field. Lame. Hitting with two strikes isn’t hard but I barely realized I had two strikes. Her birthday came up. “Happy birthday” I said. First smile I’d seen in ten minutes, ball 3, full count. Sidenote, girls who get extra happy at minor compliments have baggage, it’s a fact. Girls deprived of the little things in life grow up to over value them later. So we talked some more and she was throwing heat right down the middle, I must have fouled off three or four pitches. Her ex this, her haters at work that. I wasn’t going down and had managed to learn quite a bit but I needed a HIT, not a walk. Heres gods honest truth, women don’t want to know or even think they can strike you out, they want to maybe perhaps hope one day it will be possible but if they know they got you, not only will they strike you out but in embarrassing fashion. This is where it gets nasty. She is pissed I’ve just been fouling off pitches, wasting her time. I could easily have taken any of them the other way for a double and so she decided it was time to get me out. In my defense just having all her teeth and being fine weren’t enough to make me want to take another swing, I had to know if she was ready...ready for what I don’t know, maybe I mean find out if I was ready. Anyway here we are, inka por mi brazo came up... So did her shirt. She turns away from me and raises the back of her shirt all the way to the bra strap to show me her floral tat. Then for added effect (think of the zito walk off after his curve in ’02) she shows me the bow tatted on her hip bone, just northwest of what I can only assume is a perfectly clean shaven lady cave.
Yea…she was ready, Strike three looking and in my head I can still feel my eyes locking in. Now maybe I swing and get a dropped strike three or foul into the glove. But im frozen. She broke out a changeup right at the knees that I swore would break over the plate and just never did. I was out and didn’t even know it yet.
I think batters who swing at everything strike out a lot, but also get a lot of hits. Good hits, bad hits, bloop singles and off the wall doubles. Me, I get a lot of the same…K usually one looking back at me.
Swinging, most times looking, but either way I end up back in the dugout watching. From now on all women too me are going to have to be the one thing I really love and understand, beisbol!
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