penfield | Groupstink

"Dame Fortune is a fickle gypsy,
And always blind, and often tipsy;
Sometimes, for years and years together,
She'll bless you with the sunniest weather,
Bestowing honour, pudding, pence,
You can't imagine why or whence;-
Then in a moment-Presto, Pass!-
Your joys are withered like the grass."
- Winthrop Mackworth Praed (English politician and poet)

Imagine that you have tickets to see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden. It's his first concert of the whole tour and you've been looking forward to it for months. It's a great night for a concert and the whole day has been building up to the moment when you can get lost in the music and let your worldly worries melt away.

Then, you get to MSG and you find out that the arena has been condemned, and steel beams are falling from the ceiling to the seats below, endangering the audience, so they have to move the concert to a high school gymnasium in Hoboken. And only half of the E Street Band bothers to show up on time; Steven Van Zandt and Clarence Clemons show up an hour late, without their instruments. And by then, they only have enough time to play a rehearsal, crappily, and they never even get to "Born to Run." So you trudge home angry and unfulfilled.

That pretty much sums up my first softball "game" of 2008. But last week was when I first had a nagging suspicion that things were going to get ugly.

(Background: This will be the fourth year I've played with the "Grays," a federal agency softball team, after having been recruited from a free-agent bulletin board in mid-2004. In those four years I have graduated from Anonymous Ringer to Cocky Veteran. From 2001-2006, I played for the softball team of a private journalism company -- we'll call them the "Greens" -- until they disbanded before the 2007 season due to an echoing lack of player interest. The Greens, now with an enthusiastic new manager, have announced that they are getting the band back together and have invited me to play along, an invitation I accepted. As it happens, the Grays' first game was scheduled against the Greens.)

The Greens were supposed to have their first game last Thursday. I was unable to play, and apparently I was not the only one. According to an e-mail from the skipper, a grand total of one person replied in the affirmative, forcing a cancellation. In a separate e-mail, the same manager admitted that she herself was moving to San Francisco in a month and that the team would probably end up folding anyway.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that all systems were "go" for the game yesterday. I had agreed to play with whichever team needed the manpower, presumably the Greens (about whom it should be said that they were never particularly good, even when they had the numbers).

I got to the field at 6:00 for the 6:30 game. An envoy from the Grays had parked on the Mall to reserve a space for our game.

(More background: while much of the National Park Service's "green space" is available only by permit, the 12 blocks' worth of grass on the National Mall is first-come, first-served. So teams will send representatives to the mall to reserve it with their presence. There is room for about 16 games on the mall. Today, for example, there are 32 games scheduled, so chances are that someone will get the short end of the bat.)

On nice days, early in the season before interest has waned, teams start squatting at 3:00 p.m. The Grays' representative got there at 4:30 and settled on a patch of land that, to the uninitiated, certainly looked like a field. Unfortunately, it was in fact in the middle of a neutral zone between two fields, subject to intermittent softball bombs coming from two different directions. It would have been like trying to play softball inside Baghdad's Green Zone.

We never got to the point of trying, though, because by 6:45 p.m., only four Greens players (not including me) had arrived. You would think that journalists would be acutely sensitive to deadlines, but not only were the remaining players absent -- including the manager -- but they all apparently had their cell phones turned off. In true old-school journalism fashion, however, the folks who did show up brought with them a cooler full of beer.

Given this delay and the time to contemplate the severe physical danger of our location, the Grays manager conceded that we would have to find another field if we were going to play anything besides "ER Trauma Unit." So they went off in search of unclaimed territory while I and the rest of the Greens waited to see if anyone else would show up.

By the time the Grays claimed a patch of land on the east side of the Washington Monument, and by the time the Greens' assorted refugees and stragglers got there, too, it was past 7:15 p.m. and less than an hour's worth of sunlight was left. After some dicking around in the field, we finally organized a three-inning scrimmage in which I got one at-bat (and was robbed on a home run called foul).

It was not the game or the beginning to the season for which I had been hoping and waiting since September. And it was certainly not an encouraging indication for the future of the Greens, or -- more to the point -- my future with them.

It was just a classic clusterfu&k, brought on by a confluence of unfortunate mistakes and logistical problems. It would be easy to play the blame game, but that's not the game I'm interested in.