Why, Softball?

I was ten years old playing for the Funky Monkeys and standing on third base of Ziegler's Park softball diamond when my dad leaned down and whispered to me over the cheering from the bleachers.

“If the catcher gets in your way, just run them over.”

I nodded and positioned my right toe on the edge of the plate (slang for base), poised to run like he’d shown me two years ago when I’d first started playing. As soon as I heard the clang of the 11-inch junior softball bounce off my teammate’s bat, I pushed off the bag (also slang for base) and sprinted towards home base, my second-hand cleats throwing dirt behind me. In the few seconds it had taken me to run 60 feet, the catcher of the opposing team, a girl a full head shorter than me, had gotten the ball and was sitting on the line waiting for me to reach her. I lowered my head and stuck my left shoulder forward and didn’t even falter in my steps as I plowed into her. As I stepped on home plate, I turned to look up at the umpire and out of the corner of my eye I saw the catcher sprawled out on the grass behind the plate already sobbing into her facemask.

My left side was throbbing from the impact, but I paid it no mind as my heart broke at the sight of the sobbing girl—the girl that I had caused to cry. I felt my own eyes start to water. Numbly I walked back into the dugout and sat on the farthest edge of the bench and hid my face in my knees, too ashamed to make eye contact with any of my teammates. Over the murmur of the crowd I heard the umpire call my run an out, even though the catcher had dropped the ball making my run fair by the rules.

Every year my parents would sign me up for Bonnet Ball, the local softball recreation league for girls 8-18 years old. We would go to Dick’s Sporting Goods to sign up, and my three brothers would run around looking at all the merchandise while I had to stand with my parents to register. All the girls would be split into teams of ten to twelve, because in regular teams, there were ten positions on the field. We would get our team jerseys in an itchy cotton with thick plastic lettering printed on the front. Each team got to vote on a name, though the league didn’t start printing the team names on the jerseys until I was twelve. Before then they just read ‘Bonnet Ball’ on the front with a number on the back. I played for Funky Monkeys (the same team when I ran into that girl), Blue Lightning, Ladybugs, Storm, Twins, and a few others.

Fast forward a few years and I was involuntarily signed up to be part of my city’s youth softball competition league. We were called “Attitude,” and several of the girls on the team lived up to the name. Sarah Trump—the girl with the worst attitude whose mother was one of the volunteer coaches—would sass back everyone and everything she could, thinking she was all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips without any reason for her inflated ego. This was yet another one of those days when I stood on the field between drills with my tongue sticking to my mouth it was so dry and trying not to feel sick in the heat when she started giving sass to my dad. He had taken off work to direct our practice in the midst of the summer heat, and was still wearing his business casual and looking very out of place on the dry dirt of the field. My dad had just finished explaining a new drill that we were going to practice.

“Who are you to tell me what to do,” Sarah had snapped. A cold dread filled me as I saw the tension seize my dad’s shoulders and his eyes narrow. All my siblings knew, for the sake of your own survival, you were never supposed to question him. Her French braid and four-foot-five-inch twig of a body wouldn’t stand a chance to my six-foot-one barrel-chested dad.

I don’t remember exactly what he said as he raised his hand and pointed his thick, threatening finger at her. I could see spittle flying from his mouth as I stood frozen on the spot, waiting to witness Sarah’s death. I don’t remember what he’d said, but I remember practice being canceled after that and my dad never being head coach for Attitude again. Instead he decided that he’d only coached me one-on-one.

Next season began the regular visits to the local batting cage. Those pitching machines were very scary to stand in front of because it was a 50-50 chance if the rattling blue catapults would beam you in the side with the heavy yellow rubber softball substitutes. They were so much denser than normal softballs you had to use special equally dense bat so you wouldn’t put a dent in your normal bat. I spent so much time in this place I knew it by four different names. The business went under, was bought by another hopeful person, and reopened under new branding every few years. First it was Frozen Ropes—softball slang for being thrown or hit in a perfectly straight line. Then it was Fortress, then something I forgot, and last I heard it was called The Strike Zone.

It was at Frozen Ropes when I’d attempted to refuse to bat again after I’d been hit in the side by the heavy yellow rubber ball. My dad had told me it was once again my turn to bat I shook my head, too afraid to voice my fear, but equally afraid that I’d be hit again.

“Kenzie, your turn,” he said again, his voice a cold stern that said don’t question me.

I shook my head again, my voice already dead inside me. I was tired, my ribs ached, and I was sure that that pitching machine had it out for me.

“Get your butt outside and run laps around the building,” my dad said, his voice raised but not enough to be considered a shout.

“How many?” I asked, already accepting my fate.

“Until I come get you.”

I pulled off my helmet and set it on the bench outside of the batting cage and ran past my teammates, my eyes red and a lump in my throat. My side was still aching just below the ribs, and it nearly hurt to breathe, so I just ran to the far side of the building and sat on the curb just out of sight of the door. This felt so wrong in so many ways. I wasn’t ever allowed to be out of sight of my parents in town, so why had he sent me away? And why was he making me bat when I was scared of the pitching machine?

The grand accumulation of all this practice was tournaments hosted in St. Marks, a retirement city located four hours south of my hometown. Softball leagues from all across the state would meet in the city to compete against each other according to age group. We would play anywhere between two-to-four games a day. Sometimes double-headers (back-to-back games) that seemed like an eternity to a twelve-year-old, and oftentimes spread random times throughout the day that would get pushed back when the games scheduled beforehand went too long.

The night games of competition-league tournaments always felt so strange because the enormous spotlights lit up the field as bright as noonday, but anything beyond the fenced in fields was shrouded in blackness like the field was the only thing that existed. One game I remember my team was warming up in the outfield of an unused field. Some of the parents were helping warm us up by directing drills and my dad was doing soft-toss with whiffle balls. He was tossing whiffle balls across from me while I batted them into the fence, but I was so tired I was only going through the motions.

“Harder,” he said for what felt like hundredth time. I started hitting them faster with more strength behind my swing.

“Come on, get angry,” he said. I wasn’t angry, I was tired. This was going to be the fifth game of the day and I wanted to be done. When I didn’t ‘get angry’ he started tossing wiffle balls at me between the ones I was batting. In retrospect this was probably an attempt to rile me up, but at the time it just felt mean.

My dad spent much of his free time coaching me and researching how to better teach me, so I thought softball must be very important. He’d watch video after video on YouTube about batting and then have me watch it with him while he paused the video every few seconds to explain how and why the batter did what they did. I can explain the physics and reasoning for every step in the batting process.

During high school softball the coaches never paid me much mind. It could have been from the twenty-two other girls on the team who were always much louder than I was—the squeaky wheel gets the oil and all that—or that I was always passable with my skill level so they decided to focus on the others when they saw me performing adequately. To supplement this lack of coaching at school, I started batting on my own so I could keep my position as best batter on the team. I spent at least an hour a day batting at Frozen Ropes—or whatever the name had changed to now—keeping up my hand-eye coordination and fine-tuning my reaction time.

All this work paid off when my family went on a road trip to the 2012 Major League Baseball All-star game. My dad signed up my little brother and I for the 18-and-under home-run tournament. I was the only girl waiting on the dugout that day, and I slowly scooted along the bench as people went before me until it was my turn. I walked over to the umpire hosting the tournament and he handed me a magenta foam bat and set a wiffle ball on the tee. I could tell by his expression he was expecting me to fail after a few hits like everyone before me did, but as soon as I laid eyes on the ball I had tunnel vision.

Tunnel vision is what batters aspire to have. It’s a state of hyper-focus; an absolute concentration on the ball that blocks out all other sights and sounds while seemingly slowing down time. I didn’t hear the rest of the convention, I didn’t see the crowd on the bleachers, I didn’t even see the umpire any more as I balanced my stance in the batter’s box.

Ball after ball I launched into the outfield beyond the line that marked ‘home-run’ for the 18-and-under group. A little over half I launched over the wall that separated the indoor field from the rest of the convention. I smiled every time I noticed someone beyond the wall flinch as a wiffle ball unexpectedly flew in front of their face. Those were real home runs. Several times the umpire disrupted my home-run tunnel vision to push the magenta foam back onto the barrel of the bat. I hadn’t even noticed I was hitting hard enough that I was breaking the bat apart. My body and arms were just working on autopilot and I saw nothing but the ball. The judge had to stop me at 43 home runs because they ran out of time, and I was showing no sign of stopping. I’d never seen my talent pay off like it had then, and I’d never seen my dad smile so much before.

A high school softball practice I’ll never forget—mainly because my left ankle still snaps every time I take a step—was the one where my coach was drilling us to block the ball with your body so it wouldn’t get past us. This particular practice happened to be held during the peak of my teenage insomnia, so all my reactions were slowed that day.

“Get it this time,” Coach Lythgoe said as he got ready to toss the ball in the air to hit it at me. “Don’t let it spin to the side, hit it down in front of you.”

I nodded and bent forward in my stance, anticipating the ball’s trajectory by how he angled the bat. It skipped along the ground and I shuffled to my left to put my body in front of the ball. Seven times I got drilled in my left ankle and foot, along with a dozen other balls bounced off the ground that I blocked with my torso, but eventually I got the ball to stay in front of me. Later my ankle would swell to nearly twice its size, and I’d limp for a few weeks.

“Kenzie, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you look abused,” Mason--my brother’s friend-- said. It was my senior year of high school and he was sitting across from me in the living room of my home. I furrowed my eyebrows and looked down at myself, trying to figure out what had prompted him to say that. I leaned forward and noticed my skin visible below my knee-length shorts was polka-dotted with pale blue bruises. Each softball-sized bruise was less than an inch away from the next, with quite a few of them overlapping. I had more pale blue on my skin than I did my natural pinkish-hue.

“Oh, it’s just from softball,” I said with a shrug. I didn’t feel them anymore, I hadn’t even noticed. Being bruised had become the normal state of my body.