My New Summer Pasttime

Summer is over, and while I will NOT miss the stifling humidity and resultant SwampA**, or large women wearing disproportionately small clothing (OMG MY EYES ARE BURNING I AM SCARRED FOR LIFE), there is a huge list of things I will miss about summer.

Some fun activities that are essential to every summer? Here's a short list: BBQs; swimming; disappointment in more overhyped blockbusters movies (ahem... Wolverine, Terminator); watching Wipeout!; watching the "will he /won't he?" fiasco that is Brett Favre's (non)retirement; eating ice cream and other flavored frozen goods; reading outside in my double-wide fat-person camping chair; wrestling grizzly bears, only in my case I get the bear to submit with an armbar, and I do it shirtless; you know, standard summer stuff.

The new love I discovered this summer: Wiffleball. It's simple. Anyone can play. You don't need a lot of people to play. You try to hit people with a ball. Very rewarding.

More important to me, though, is that wiffleball has helped me reconcile with a long lost friend: baseball. My complaints with baseball are well-documented. It's boring. It's slow. These dudes aren't athletic. Baseball slang is just a bunch of thinly-veiled innuendos. Whine whine whine. I actually loved baseball growing up, but somewhere along the way we had a falling out (partially due to his solid decade and a half of heavy steroid usage).

Wiffleball helped me remember why I enjoyed baseball in the first place by taking me back to being a kid. It reminded me of playing catch with my pops. Of smelling freshly cut grass, watching The Sandlot, and especially of playing Little League baseball.

In Little League, just like every other kid, I imitated the batting stances and the mannerisms of the famous players. I tried to swing my bat like Griffey, tried to crouch in fielding position like Ozzie Smith, and itched my crotch like Cal Ripken Jr. Did I know what I was doing at 9-years of age? No. But hell, these guys were my heroes, and somewhere in the back of my head I thought emulating the greats would help me be great. This thinking, of course, pre-dated my knowledge of things like natural talent, work ethic, syringes, and the Dominican Republic's baseball farm system. So if Cal was going to go to town on his cup region, I would, too.

I write this because when I played wiffleball for the first time this summer, 18 years after having played in Little League, I picked up right where I left off. I looked at my bat contemplatively before stepping into the batter's box, dug in my feet with my non-existent cleats, took a wide stance and tilted my bat slightly back, just like Albert Pujols.

Even if it was only for a few hours, I was a kid again, imitating the greats. And while the sound of the plastic wifflebat hitting a ball doesn't have quite the same ring that metal on cork does, it still made me smile like a 9-year old as I ran the bases.

Man. Now I want to go watch Field of Dreams.