Recreation League Softball

Hello, I live in a very rural community called Lusk, WY.  It is a town of 1500 people with two U.S. Highways connecting to Lusk, U.S. Highway 85 and U.S. Highway 20.  The town has two stoplights, a handful of motels, a Subway restaurant, a wonderful Pizza Place and other businesses.  One thing Lusk has is a summer recreational softball league and let me tell you this is serious business in Lusk, WY. 

I am a member of the Lusk Alliance Church’s softball team.  Our record this year is 1 and a very high number, too high to count and I don’t want to be too embarrassed in my first blog to you people, so let’s just say we have one win.  We have many different types of people on our team, men, women ages 15 all the way up to 59, or at least that is what he claims his age to be.  We have people from different churches in our league and we have fun.  We play hard but we have fun. 

The thing that I am amazed at is how competitive some of the teams are and how serious they are if things don’t go their way.  Here is an example of this.  One team in our league purchased a 300 dollar bat to use in games.  I guess the first question I have to ask is why would you spend that much money on a bat for a recreation league in Lusk,Wyoming?  I can think of ways to spend that money, like mortgage, phone, car, etc…. but this team consists of high school students, and if you haven’t noticed a majority of high school students own better “stuff” than us old timers do.  Ok, back to the bat, this bats apparently is designed to make a ball travel longer, maybe we should call this the enzyte bat.  There are two problems this bat creates, one it gives an unfair advantage to a team by enabling them to hit more home runs.  Second the ball apparently comes off the bat 30 miles an hour faster that a certified ASA bat.  ASA stands for Amateur Softball Association.  A certified ASA bat allows the ball to travel off a bat 98 miles per hour.  This particular bat gives it 30 extra miles per hour.  Grand total is………128 miles per hour.  So let’s see…..I am a pitcher standing 45 feet away from a batter an he hits me with a 128 mile per hour ball in the head……….they would have to cancel the next softball game for my funeral.  I see you are thinking this is unfair and the disallowed the bat right?  Nope they had a “meeting” of all coaches and allowed the bat to be used and allowed any bat to be used.  So safety first is a definite priority of the Lusk recreation league.  I have to ask myself why do incidents like this creep into a softball league in Lusk, WY.  As far as I know and I am not very knowledgeable, just ask my students and my wife, Major League Baseball scouts are not going to slow pitch softball games to recruit future talent.  It might be different in my case, I hear that last week the Yankees sent someone to scout me for the hot dog vendor position they have open but that is a different story.  So why do we hang our heads when we make a horrible error, like a ball going between our legs, or a base running mistake?  Why do we argue with volunteer umpires about bad calls?  Their decisions might effect the outcome of the game but is it going to effect the way your life turns out?  I think probably not.  So people on the Lusk recreational league, let’s chill out and remember that baseball is a game that we have a privilege of playing for fun.  If we aren’t going to have fun and make this our whole life, then I am asking for a hefty contract raise next summer.