Opening Day

[Mike Oltmans <moltmans@>]

Opening day continues (if your belly is full of chili you know what I 
mean, if you don't, you wouldn't; tough nuggies) also known as more 
mishaps in the Baseball life of Mike.

Have you ever seen anyone play T-Ball?  If not just imagine a baseball 
game where everything is pretty much normal except for one small thing. 
 The pitcher is a poser and the "pitches" are stationary.  The ball 
sits (helplessly and pitifully) on a stand waiting to have the crap 
beaten out of it.  The poor little ball doesn't even have a chance to be 
tended to by the pitcher's loving hands.  And it has precious little 
chance of avoiding the sharp crack of the bat.  (But the pitcher does 
still get to wind up and pretend to throw a swerving knuckle ball).

But seeing the poor unloved state of the helpless ball I devised a plan 
in my 10 year old brain.  I would help the ball.  I would swing the bat 
just over the ball to give it a nice waft of fresh air.  On the second 
swing I would carefully knock the stand out from under it to set it 
painlessly free to fall softly onto home plate.  And then, if I hadn't 
repeated this process 3 times already I would sometimes hit it as softly 
as I could so that it would gently float out to the pitcher who could 
gingerly catch it and send it back to home plate to be brutalized by the 
next batter (the bastard!).

My teammates didn't seem to care much for my kindness to baseballs but 
the other teams were always much more appreciative, and my parents 
always seemed to think that I had done well and they wouldn't have lied 
to me about something like that, so I was happy.

For more tales of black eyes, clover picking outfielders, and getting 
hit by bikers, swing by this weeks...

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   girl scout benefit -+-  5:30 pm  -+- 7ai playroom
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