Phthursday Musings: Bat This One Around

I have multiple subjects from the past few weeks which I could potentially dive into. As I should - I’ve written almost nothing in the last month!

But it’s one of those things many of you have experienced: when you’re out of the groove, you’re out of the groove. And things I’ve wanted to write about, I’ve just kind of lost my understanding of what I’ve wanted to say.

So I’m going to tell this little story here and see if there’s some moral hiding beneath the surface. As I write this paragraph, I don’t know how I’m going to turn into some kind of parable, but maybe by the time I’m done…

I’ve written before about playing 16 inch softball. For reference, here’s a picture of a 16 inch ball next to a regular old baseball:

I wrote last October about playing 16 inch ball:

I’m not going to go into all of the back story again. Suffice to say that I play Monday nights in the late spring through early fall. I play outfield, and it’s always an adventure trying to catch a pop fly 16 inch softball.

For many years I’ve used my mom’s bat, as I mentioned in the October piece. It’s not explicitly a 16 inch bat, but it’s a softball bat, so, okay, all good, right?

A couple years ago someone else using it remarked that they thought it might be cracked on the inside. But I never noticed anything like that.

Several weeks ago I took Some Weird Kid to the batting cages, and took the bat into a slow pitch cage, took some swings, and WOW DID THAT STING. The vibrations were so intense that both elbows still hurt hours later.

Now here is the thing. If you go to the batting cages, a dollar gets you 8 swings or so. It might take two to three games before you get 8 swings in actually playing games, because chances are, I’ll get up to bat about 3 times, and swing at the first pitch and put it into play most of the time. So only a concentrated number of swings was really going to tell me that, yeah, maybe there’s something wrong with the bat.

I have also been using batting gloves for years. I’ve long been convinced that when I don’t use gloves, I over-grip the handle, and roll over the ball as a result.

A few weeks ago, on a second trip, I took Some Weird Kid Plus His Mother to the batting cages, and brought along a different bat I had. I had the same kind of vibration problems. Hey, there must be a reason why I got that bat for a buck ten years ago!

After this particular trip to the cages, my batting gloves managed to get into a pocket where I forget where they were. So I wound up, three weeks ago, going to a game without a bat and without batting gloves.

And I hit a home run.

Now, to be clear: I did not hit the ball over someone’s head or over a fence. But neither was this a Little League home run with a lot of errors involved. Rather, what I hit was a hard line drive that hit the left field line, and thanks to how hard I hit it, plus the spin on the ball, it kept rolling and rolling and rolling all the way to the street. And I’m not the fastest player around, but for a 46 year old, I can still move around the bases well enough.

It was the first time I had hit a legitimate without-the-benefit-of-an-error home run since I was 9 years old.

We, uh, lost the game 12-1.

We had a week off for the holiday and were back in action this week. It was not originally by design, but we wound up with multiple people missing the game, and I wound up batting cleanup. I don’t remember the last time I might have done that. We usually bat 11 or 12 people, but this particular game, we only had 9, so I wound up at the plate 5 times.

I didn’t hit another home run. But I did, in my fourth at bat, hit the ball even harder than I’d hit the home run, I just managed to hit it sky high to the left fielder. And it was that hit that gave me pause.

Have I actually been hitting the ball harder than I’ve realized for a while, but the power has been gone from the bat?

Or is it instead that these years of working out to try and deal with these bulging discs has gotten me to a place where I’m just that much stronger than I realized?

Or is it all a fluke?

I want to stress here that I’m not about to start burning people all the time. I’m not suddenly some extreme athletic specimen!

It has all given me pause to think though that I’m capable of doing more than I thought. Or maybe that’s not quite right… maybe I thought I was capable, but I hadn’t really proven it to myself. I’m honestly not sure.

By day it so happens that I’m a director overseeing a sizable group of software engineers, and I often have to give thought to what these people are capable of. And, well, they’re capable of a whole lot! This week I actually had to submit recommendations for things like promotions and raises.

And I wonder: What if I handed a different bat to some of them? What would that mean?

Also I wonder: Oh shit has this week’s Musings turned into a fucking TED Talk?

To borrow from Rocket J. Squirrel, and now here’s something we hope you’ll really like:

By the time another Musings drops in your inbox, the Women’s World Cup will have kicked off. This year’s hosts are Australia and New Zealand, and I really wish we were going to be there for some of the matches.

Alas, we won’t be going to New Zealand. So I have to bring New Zealand to you! Here’s the video for “Vector 27” from the mighty 3Ds’ excellent 1996 album Strange News from the Angels:

Here’s The Clean with the 1982 video for their single “Getting Older”:

And by popular demand, here’s something much more current, the video for “Magic” from Voom with Fazerdaze, from just last year!

No, I have no idea who Voom is or who Fazerdaze is, but they’re from New Zealand and they’re on Flying Nun and they have great names, what else do you people want anyway?

Finally, I can’t fling Kiwipop at you without adding a little Bailter Space. To my astonishment, there’s a video for “Pass It Up” from 1997’s Capsul:

No, me sharing videos from four New Zealand bands has absolutely nothing to do with a softball bat, but maybe if I share a fifth video I can bring this to a close. Here’s “Made Up in Blue” from 1986 from that other excellent Kiwi band: The Bats.

Until next week, and may you too load up on the fuzzy pop music in preparation for the World Cup!