I Got to Second Base!

The Bellingham Bells lost last night to the Wenatchee AppleSox — yes, seriously, they’re called the AppleSox — in the third game of a three game, elimination series. That means they won’t be playing for the league championship this weekend.

With the Bells done and my dad and kid brother’s team over for the year, this will mean considerably less baseball blogging. For those readers who were getting sick of it, indulge me in one last story for the foreseeable.

This story is about a much younger version of your diarist. It was sometime during my fourth grade year. We had moved to a new house and new school in Tacoma — from University Place to the North End — called Sherman Elementary.

I was never popular in K-12, but add “the new kid” and you can understand why, when we had a T-ball game in PE, the pecking order operated the way it did. The captains of both teams figured, “He’s weird and he can’t hit,” and so I was picked dead last, grudgingly, and stuck at the back of the lineup.

Now, I had a secret: I could hit — not just connect for a base hit, but really crush the heck out of the ball. But they didn’t know that, so when it finally got around to my turn at the plate, it seemed like a fun idea to torture both teams.

“Come in,” yelled one of the outfielders when he saw I was up at the T and they moved to about midfield. I looked at them, mustered a certain look on my face and… hit the T.

They came in further. I put on the same look and missed again, this time intentionally swinging over the ball.

They came in further so that they were just on the periphery of the infield. I screwed up my face again, cocked my bat and swung away. It hit the fence on one bounce. The outfielders ran like crazy to try to contain the damage.

Several runs scored. I walked to second base and could have made third easy. “Run!” the folks on my team screamed. But remember I was picked last, so second base seemed about right.