ONE of the things I miss most as I get older and slow down is softball. Hitting a baseball was my proudest talent. It's one of the few things I'll ever boast about. I didn’t make
the major leagues, but ...Today, I see 8 year olds flailing at pitches thrown underhand by coaches. In my Little League days, you could play in the major division at that age if you were good enough. You had to face 12-year-old pitchers who seemed like giants. I didn't knock down fences off their wicked fastballs, but they didn't strike me out often either. I put the ball in play.
By the time I was one of the big kids, I could handle a bat like a wand. I could pull outside pitches, take inside pitches to the opposite field and hit line drives up the middle almost at will. I once hit safely in 11 consecutive at-bats.
Until my mid-teens, I expected to become a Los Angeles Dodger. Then I learned the cruel truth: The National League has little use for a fat Punch and Judy hitter who runs like a slug and can't throw.
I stopped playing and went slumming in intellectualism for years until I discovered slow-pitch softball. If I could hit a fastball in pretty much any direction I wished, I could land a lobbed softball on a dime in the outfield -- with a half-dozen different kinds of spin to ricochet the ball past fielders.
I enjoyed when the old Star-Bulletin team, the Bad News Bearers, played against state judges. In one game, former Judge Patrick Yim was playing right field wearing a hot jacket on a stifling day. I didn't see him making any diving catches in that get-up.
My first time up, I lined one at him and he misplayed the ball. I was so slow and lazy that I usually stopped at first base and called for a pinch runner no matter how far I hit it. But that ball rolled so far past Yim that I would have taken unbearable ridicule from my teammates if I hadn't tried for second base.
Bad decision. I slipped on the gravel rounding first and tore off lots of skin before being thrown out.
The next time up, I wanted payback. Yim made me run, so I'd make him run. I landed one at his feet with heavy English that bounced the ball sharply to His Honor's left. I strolled all the way home by the time he caught up with it in the parking lot.
In another game, Judge Marie Milks was in right field. I told their catcher, Judge Bambi Weil, that I would hit it to Milks and proceeded to drop a line drive just out of her reach. The next time up I told Weil I would hit it to the same place. She waved for Milks to move over but, again, the ball landed just beyond her grasp.
My next time up, Weil was getting testy. "Women judges have enough trouble being accepted by the men without you going out of your way to make us look bad," she said.
CHASTENED, I aimed away from Milks and hit a shot up the middle that caught the pitcher, Appeals Court Judge James Burns, squarely in the shin. He grimaced in pain, but coolly retrieved the ball and threw me out. He shrugged off my apology.
A week later, we were at a crowded social function and Burns called me over. He propped his foot on a coffee table and pulled up his pant leg to reveal a huge purple bruise. I felt awful, but he was all smiles. "When you hit the ball that hard, you have a right to see what you got for it," Burns said. Now that's what I call a man.
I always thought I'd spend my golden years starring in the Makule League, but my long-suffering legs won't likely cooperate. The nice thing, I suppose, is that I can brag all I want about what a great hitter I was and not have to prove it anymore.