The Road to 14 Losses
Last year, the City Paper softball team won exactly one game in our 16-game season in the Metropolitan Media Softball League. This year, we’re hoping to double that talley. On Saturday, we held our compressed spring training at Veirs Mill Park in Rockville, followed by a scrimmage with Channel 4. Many of our team looked good, some of us looked rusty, and your correspondent discovered his unnatural ability to catch balls with anything but his glove (my ankle, for instance, got pegged by a line drive from Senior Editor Mike DeBonis, who damn well better get all of his copy in on time this week).
Channel 4 looked dauntingly good. No one kept score at practice, but my rough estimate was that were this a real game, they’d have beaten us 135-2. Our first real games are next week, and if the inexplicable decision to play me at second stands, we are totally screwed. That said, our production director, Mike Kalyan, has wangled some pretty sweet jerseys and caps for us this year so at least we won’t be sweating our butts off in black CP T-shirts anymore.
We’re in the same division this year as the Associated Press, the Examiner, and the National Press Club, and I’d like to take this opportunity to express how much we look forward to losing to all of them. With honor, or at least fake smiles.
April 16th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I think you underestimated how much we would have lost by.
You didn’t mention the fact that, in the wake of the game, some of us feel like we were beaten with bats rather than just swinging them. In making lists of “Parts of My Body That Don’t Hurt” the Sunday after, I came up with this:
1. My nose
2. My tongue
But now I have to cross the latter off the list, because I taste the horrible forthcoming shame of the sad sad season ahead, and it stings.