July 07, 2008

Baseball

Monday night I had the dubious honor of being the home-plate umpire at a little league baseball game... I had a front-row seat to six of the worst innings of baseball EVER played. I'll cut right to the chase: the final score was 22 to... wait for it... wait for it... 2! That's right, there was a TWENTY point spread.

These were 9 and 10 year old kids. The difference between skill-sets was absurd, especially in pitching. The "visiting" team's pitchers had mechanics while the "home" team was just playing catch, badly. Mechanics? I didn't even know what mechanics were when I was ten. For example, the "home" team's last pitcher -- I had to open the strike-zone to the point of where if the batter didn't have to dodge the pitch and it wasn't in the dirt or over the batter's head, it was a strike. It took this last "home" pitcher close to fifty pitches for him to get out of the inning and he didn't get any strike-outs. It was painful.

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