Departing why.i.hate.dc blogger Rusty poses with two of his least favorite D.C. institutions—Smith Point and City Paper—in an interview with washingtonian.com. When asked what one thing he’d improve about Washington, a city he’s been hating on so much that he considers moving to Columbus, Ohio, a step up, “Eliminating the Washington City Paper once and for all.”

Really, all he’d ever have to do to fulfill that fantasy is to join a team that plays us at softball. As detailed on this blog, our softball team was overmatched in every contest we played this year. We forfeited our final game, not for a staff meeting—we tend to hold those on weekdays—but because most of the team had to volunteer at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring.

Never did quitting feel so good. I blogged a while back about the difficulty of getting up and driving for 45 minutes to get your bahookie thumped by some team with “video” in its name.

Thing is, I like playing softball. We all do. But serving as cannon fodder for the fine folks at the Gazette papers isn’t really all that fulfilling. So here’s what I’m thinking. Around town, there have to be publications staffed by people as hopeless as we are. Sculpture, I’m looking at you! Hey Preservation, preserve this!

I am proposing a league of wusses. DCist! We must at least stand a chance against you! National Geographic! Actually, I’ll bet those sturdy explorers at National Geographic could wallop us. But National Geographic Kids! Ranger Rick! Callin’ you out, too! Metro Connection! Current Newspapers!

Will Mitchell: Washington City Paper Web Programmer by day, Internet superstar by night.

Mitchell, forever immortalized on the Express softball “Opening Day” online photo album (shown here absorbing the weight of the Express’s Chip Porter), has again become fodder for Internet gossips/tween scrapbooks. Yesterday, the Huffington Post (ever heard of it?) went big on Mitchell with this report of his trip to hand-deliver a letter to Barack Obama protesting his position on the FISA bill. Watch your back, Barack:

Note to HuffPo: Mitchell delivered the letter to Obama’s D.C. offices, not his Chicago headquarters. He is but one man.

Print out your pocket-sized collector’s editions after the jump.

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Record: 0-12 (.000)

Last Saturday, as the City Paper Shadows neared the end of our final media league double-header, the sun shone unforgivingly upon this ragtag group of Staff Writers, Managing Editors, and Account Executives. We had just weathered a relatively tight game against the Washington Post (17-4[!]), and had nearly finished up an even tighter match-up against the Express (14[!]-3). Both teams had lucked out that day: According to media league softball lore, if you can spy a City Paper Shadow on the field, you will score many runs.

We were hot. We were tired. We were, well, really bad at softball. It was totally the point in The City Paper Shadows 2008: The Motion Picture where everything inexplicably improves, resulting in an against-all-odds victory involving 33 consecutive home runs, Shadows coach Will Mitchell being hoisted gloriously upon the team’s shoulders as the ump yells “The Shadows Take the Pennant!,” and hot babes.

Behold! In the final out of the final inning of the final game of what, if we’ve learned anything, will be our final season, Circulation Manager Sterling Smith arrived (Back row, 1st from R).

Some say He descended from the sky as a pegasus, His magestic wingspan reaching clear from first to third. Others say He emerged from the forest depths as unicorn, His gallop fast as swunt. Either way, he’d hit really bad traffic, which apparently had kept him away from the field for our first two months of play.

Whatever: He had arrived.

Mitchell performed some emergency surgery on the batting order. Smith was in. He stepped up to the plate. The Express’s outfield turned around and headed toward the home-run zone. The Shadows held our collective breath. “Is he actually good at softball, or is he just really big?” I remember wondering aloud. No one answered. We would find out soon enough.

Express pitched. Smith swung. There was no mistaking it: It was a swunt, plain and simple. The ball bounced lazily to the pitcher, who lobbed the ball to first. It was over. Finally, it was over.

It was a perfect end to a perfect season. Thanks Metropolitan Media Softball League: It’s been demoralizing.

 
Record: 0-whatever (.fuckit)

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in “One Art,” a poem that could double as the Shadows’ theme song. “So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”

So by Bishop’s logic, Shadows games are disaster-free zones. AP beats us by 14 runs? Another day at the office. Atlantic Video beats us by 26 runs? Big deal: Team Video registered a 27-run win against us the week before. Maybe we’re improving. Still, the steady accrual of losses do wear on a person—I could better speak to the nobility of RF Marcello Goldberger’s second-game injury involving a pop fly and his lip (see picture above) if I could argue it occurred in the midst of a tough game. As it was, Atlantic Video eventually tested out their left-handed swings and second-string pitcher.

Cynical? Me? Not at all! Or much! I’ve actually been looking forward to next Saturday’s games against our dead-tree-media fellow travelers, the Post and Express. Still, presented with the option of two more losses in D.C. or a vacation in Chicago, I’m going where the Italian beef is.

Record: 0-8 (.000)

Last Saturday, not long after helping the City Paper Shadows lose three games in a row, I helped host a small dinner party at my house. Among the guests was an 8-year-old boy. He plays in a baseball league, I play in a softball league. So, we had much to discuss.

“How many home runs did you hit this season?” he asked.

Uh, none.

“How many triples?”

I don’t think I hit any triples, no.

“How many doubles?”

I might have hit a double at some point, I think. Yes, maybe.

“How many games did you win this season?”

Not a one.

“We won all our games. We’re going to the playoffs.”

Suddenly I realized that I needed to get up and go refill drinks.

Things were dispiriting even before the games began Saturday morning: By the time we took the field for our first game against the AP, the temperature had climbed to (rough estimate) 380 degrees. And it didn’t help that the pregame pep talk from our manager, Will Atwood Mitchell, was cribbed from a played-out Internet meme. But getting manhandled by the AP 12-2 wasn’t worst of it. The worst of it wasn’t even the 29-2 shellacking we got from Team Video, immediately after they played a tough 10-inning game against the Examiner.

No, the worst of it was the final inning in our final game of the day, against the National Press Club. The Metropolitan Media Softball League has a slaughter rule, with which we are intimately familiar, that dictates ending a game at five innings if one team is ahead by 12 or more runs. The NPC had only racked up 11 against us, though, presenting a bit of a dilemma. Because it was around 1 p.m. and the temperature had reached (rough estimate) 468 degrees, it would’ve been easy enough to just say screw it—boot a grounder, drop a pop fly, let ‘em have a run. We have too much integrity to do that. Yet integrity is meaningless in the face of ineptitude. Mitchell had worked a bit of managerial magic by shaking up the lineup and positions for the third game, but between the heat, our being too short-staffed to make substitutions, and our general cynicism, I came to a realization so obvious and sudden it could’ve concluded the third act of a Wonder Years episode. We didn’t have to throw the game to end it quickly—we just had to play our hardest, and the loss would be ours.

Lesson: Never state publicly that God is on your side.

Photo by Express‘ Holly J. Morris

I don’t play on the City Paper softball team.

As outlined in these pages, the squad is hurting for bodies and talent. I have only the former to give, but I’m not going to.

Me and guys I grew up with had a team in Northern Virginia for 23 years. We were never that good, and finally quit in 2003, after several summers of getting pounded by younger teams. I still love and deal with my teammates, but I’d rather spend a summer in old-school Abu Ghraib than on a softball team with them or anybody else.

Now, whenever anybody mentions getting the team back together, I watch this video. I don’t know who these people are, but I feel like I know them. Anybody who has played non-coed softball for any length of time has lived through this sort of douchedom.

Better than any book or movie or Dr. Phil episode, this clip explains men and wars — and why I never want to play softball again.

A memo recovered from the National Press Club’s softball team reveals the club’s top-secret strategy against the City Paper Shadows in our upcoming face-0ff this Saturday:

We’re tied for first place in our division with Team Video and Atlantic Video, and if we can win all three games, we’ll be in great shape both divisionwise and playoff wise. I’m hoping to open an early lead against City Paper and then use that game to give lots of playing time to everyone who will get short shrift in the first two games.

Early lead—hah! How did that early lead work out for you last time? (The time after you beat us 18-5?) Oh, I remember—God pwned you. You scored a mere 13 runs in the first inning before He totally smote you with a storm of Biblical proportions!

Go ahead, NPC. Test Him again. Don’t mind us—we’ll just be chasing after your home run balls in the bushes behind left field.

Photo by Express‘ Holly J. Morris

 
Record: 0-5 (.000)

That record above notwithstanding, every member of the City Paper softball team brings a special talent to the table. Me, I’m very good at filling in the tiny boxes on scorecards. It’s something you get a lot of practice doing on the Shadows bench. The opposing team scores a run, I fill in a box. The first inning of our second game against the National Press Club hadn’t even ended, and I wound up doing it one, two, three…thirteen times.

So, Andrew’s prediction was right on the money. But a funny thing happened on the way to what promised to be our sixth devastating loss in a row. One of the umpires noticed a lightning bolt not far from the Layhill fields; raindrops started falling soon after, and the game was called. So though we got our asses kicked twice Saturday, the only ass-kicking that counts was our 18-5 loss in the first game.

Unlike some nerds, we don’t keep official stats for our players. But pitcher Tim Carman bravely endeavored to calculate what that 13-run pasting would’ve spelled for his earned run average. Here’s his report:

I will assume, for argument’s sake, that every run was earned. That translates into an ERA of 175.41, which would, I think, earn me a spot in the starting rotation for the Kansas City Royals.

I blame my high ERA on a number of things:

1. My inability to throw strikes.

2. Shortstop Jason “The Croquet Wicket” Hutto

3. The National Press Club

4. God

5. Ted Lerner

6. The high price of food

In the end, I have to thank the umpire for calling the game before the first inning was over. I believe those stats will not officially count. In your face, Press Club!

Photo by Express‘ Holly J. Morris

Those are the first words I think on Saturday mornings, at least the Saturday mornings that the CP Shadows actually play softball. And yes, I mentally italicize them, per house style.

Last year, we got into a groove—show up, get our asses kicked, go for pizza. This year has been more difficult, because the 6-hour wedge softball drives into the heart of my weekend has been dulled by one delay after another, either for weather or for a holiday. We haven’t played since April 26, and it has been bliss, weekend-wise.

But now it all ends. Barring a weather event such as Capital Weather Gang is getting all in-a-bunch about, we’re gonna face the National Press Club TWICE tomorrow. Last year I tried to unnerve the Press Club bats by shouting “Rich Little!” and when that didn’t work, “The Unforgettable Fire,” because, adapting Stanley Bing’s advice to encourage a business partner to order bacon and eggs at breakfast, I figured a reference to a commonly cherished childhood album would trigger all sorts of reveries on their part and maybe they’d become too distracted to knock us down like French prizefighters.

It didn’t work. And I will try it tomorrow, too, but only for old times’ sake. Adieu, weekends without softball, adieu.

Photo by Express‘ Holly J. Morris

The last few weeks of rain have not only been a boon to the region’s drought-stricken agriculture sector. They have been a glorious time to be a member of the City Paper’s star-crossed softball team, the Shadows.

Because when we don’t play, we don’t lose.

“I think that the past two weeks have been nothing but a confidence-builder for our team,” says RF Mark Athitakis.

1B Mike DeBonis appreciates not having to make an early start. “It’s also been the best two weeks for weekend sleeping in,” he says.

Manager Will Atwood Mitchell (above) says he’s looking forward to the possibility of playing tripleheaders to make up the rain dates, which are compounded by the fact that the league is taking Memorial Day off. Mitchell says the team is “really looking forward to some tripleheaders because as everyone in the league is aware, when you play tripleheaders, all the rules have to be thrown out.”

The legality of Mitchell’s contention is a subject of hot debate on the Metropolitan Media Softball League blog, where CP LF Matt Smaldone has set off a firestorm of controversy by suggesting that in tripleheaders, the league’s normal rules, requiring, for instance, three women to play each game, be jettisoned. Commenters have fired back with the brand of baffling humorlessness that is the hallmark of the MMSL: “Play by the rules or don’t play. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen,” writes “blog blog blog.” “MS, have you been appointed commissioner and I didn’t know about it?” writes “robertjterry,” which is, in fact, the name of the league’s commissioner. Says “amac”: “you’re an idiot … has your team ever made the playoffs?”

Well, uh, no, “amac,” but I can’t imagine anyone on our squad making a comment like another one of your gems: “however if you’ve got 100 bags of kitty litter and 25 illegals all carrying rakes and blowtorches, you can play tomorrow, let me know how it goes.”

Photo by Express‘ Holly J. Morris

UPDATE 9:54 p.m.: Someone’s gone in and edited “amac”’s quote to omit the words “illegals” and “blowtorches.” Now he just urges a detractor to “get your rake, shovel, and kitty litter for those fields, let me know how it works out.” Nice transparency, Media League!

Record: 0-4 (.000)

Last night, Matthew Smaldone—who’s been doing heroic work for the City Paper Shadows making left field a place where doubles go to die—sent an e-mail to his fellow players. He linked to a Web site called How to Play Slow-Pitch Softball as a Team. The page, Smaldone wrote, had “good advice on hitting, fielding, throwing, pitching.”

It’s not the e-mail you send out after you’ve handily bested your opponents in a couple of games.

Shortly before our Saturday matchup against the Examiner, we had some reasons to feel positive. During BP, Amanda Hess had mastered a swinging-bunt technique we promptly called a “swunt,” and logistics manager Will Atwood Mitchell had stirred up the team with a quote from the Tao Te Ching: “When two great forces oppose each other, the victory will go to the one that knows how to yield.” And yield we did, though I’d argue that our loss to the Examiner was a lot closer than the 9-2 final score might suggest; Kim Dorn delivered some solid at-bats, including a stand-up double, and Tim Carman was smart on the mound, leading the Ex’s biggest bats to swing at some bad pitches.

But our performance in the second game at Layhill was every bit as brutal as the 22-1 final score suggests; clearly Atlantic Video is hungry after making an early exit in the playoffs last year. Swunting is no use against a team that was still working hard to make put-outs even when the game’s outcome was certain. All we could do was watch the hammering, as the photo above shows; that’s me on the right, softly sobbing and looking forward to the bye week. (Photo from the MMSL’s Web site.)

Correction: As Mitchell rightly points out in the comments, the photo above was actually from 4/19 softball action. I was probably still sobbing, though.

Record: 0-2 (.000)

Losses! We all have them. But not all losses are created alike, as we learned midway through our game against the Gazette last Saturday. Our team is proud to claim some battle-hardened vets who remember losing in all sorts of ways in 2007. But here’s how bad—how heart-crushingly, cover-your-face-with-your-mitt-to-hide-the-tears bad—it got in the midst of our 21-1 spanking at the meaty hands of the Gazette: Eventually the umpire asked their best hitters, their right-handed hitters, to bat left-handed.

Oh, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that they kept on getting hits.

Happily, this didn’t diminish our enthusiasm for the second game of the morning, against Express. Our bats finally came out, and we were blessed with some fine fielding, especially from Matt Smaldone, Jason Hutto, and Tim Carman, whose Tinker-Evers-Chance-grade skills resulted in some critical putouts at home plate. Still, though, the Express came away with a 20-6 win, blowing the game wide open in the late innings.

Hutto’s strong play rightfully earned him the game ball, but a strong honorable mention goes to Will Atwood Mitchell, who weathered an attack at first base by ungrammatical Express attack dog Bake McBride. See for yourself:

Photo by Express‘ Holly J. Morris

Yesterday, the Metropolitan Media Softball League invited team representatives to answer a series of questions about their squads. I gather that this was done in the hopes of producing some kind of scouting report in advance of the season, which begins Saturday. Do the powers that be at MMSL truly believe we’re gonna give up our strategy so easily? Here’s what we filed in response:

1. Team name: The Washington City Paper Shadows, named after Billy “Honor Box” Shadows, a one-time circulation manager for CP who, in 1987, was killed by a hard-hit line drive by an Express staffer. He’s now buried behind the backstop of field #2 at Layhill. Go ahead–check!

2. 2007 record 1-15. Take that, Express!

3. Key returning players (and positions) Look, did you hear what happened to us last summer? We’re just grateful to have enough people left in the building to put together a team.

4. Promising new faces (and positions) Reports our manager, Will Atwood Mitchell: “We have a couple of new positions that we’re really excited about, particularly Eighth Baseman and Shortpitcher. As for new faces, we’re working hard on this one face we like to call “OMG WTF” which we think will come in handy on defense.”

5. Character on “The Office” your team most closely resembles You know that scene in “Diversity Day” where Michael keeps taunting Kelly by going “googi googi” and then gets slapped in the face? We’re like that: Humiliatingly horrible, but we just won’t stop.

6. How do you think this season of “Lost” will end? With exciting promos for future ABC programming!

7. How do you think this season of the MMSL will end? Uh, with exciting promos for future ABC programming?

8. Complete this sentence: If we HIRE BO JACKSON AS A STAFF WRITER, we’re going to be tough to beat in 2008. (Thanks, Will.)

9. What team do you think will be hoisting the Tuttle Trophy as league champions? Us! With great joy and enthusiasm! And then the cops’ll come by and tell us to hand the thing over as the members of the National Press Club, the trophy’s rightful owner, stare at us with a look that merges contempt and anger. Those guys are tough.