Old Dog, Old Tricks

Dirty hands mean clean money, so goes the blue-collar excuse for not owning an Aston Martin.  Either that, or letting Davenport rescind that goofy breach of contract notice when it was fun and crazy to work there.  Because crazy without fun?  Well, there’s no point to that. 

Learned something yesterday.  Or, I did something wrong.  Sometimes, hard to tell the difference. 

Anyway, after a full fifty years of baseball, they put me at shortstop.  The defensive kings of the diamond are (well, technically, whoever the ball is heading to next) catchers and centerfielders.  Some would say shortstop, but these are only people who have not experienced the grand wonder of that great expanse of turf, and being able to call every single player off the ball.  Anyway, 85 year-old player / manager Denis put me at short, and who am I to say no to an 85 year-old player / manager?     

Holy cow.  The ball gets there quickly.  And it bounces around all crazy sometimes.  Crazy and fun.  Just like Davenport was way back when.  Ok.  I got this. 

The funny thing was you can take the boy out of centerfield, but you can’t take the centerfield out of the boy.  The starting footwork was centerfield footwork.  The calling people off the ball.  Um, centerfield here … I got it.  The looking for the cutoff man.  The main thing was not one of these darn balls is getting past me.  Which is ridiculous, but habits don’t break just because you’re standing over here instead of over there. 

I was pouncing on the grounders like a hyena ambushing a still-warm wildebeest carcass.  Yum.  Tasty.  You’re not getting away from me.  It felt weird and probably looked a little unorthodox.  But it was effective. 

Here’s the thing I learned.  There’s dirt in the infield.  Who knew?  I’d come up from the pouncing with the ball and enough dirt to bring a casino up to grade in my mitt.  The crow hop throw to first (really, who is this idiot at short?) gave me time to sift the ball out of the shovel full of Mother Earth and send it on its way, looking like a dirty comet, racing a pensioner to first. 

It was huge fun, and as I semi-washed my filthy hands with my water bottle when it was over, I thought a bit about how adaptation just might be overrated.  

Or ... um ... impossible.