I Rant

...therefore I am. (Dennis Miller)


Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.



I am very irritated today to put it mildly. So much so that after my baseball game I decided to not take a bus home but to walk the approximately 3.7 kilometers, or for you Americans out there 2.3 miles. It is not that bad of a walk but considering that I could have easily just hoped on a bus and get home a lot sooner I think it says something about the temperament I was and currently still am in and also the fact that I had to carry all my ball gear the entire way too.

So the question is why am I so irked? Well lets take a step back for a moment to before I started playing baseball in Ottawa. I have a buddy who at one point said that I would absolutely for sure be able to play on the team that he plays on when summer came. Guess how that turned out. Yeah it was getting close to summer and I had not heard anything yet when I finally asked him what was up and he said that unfortunately all the spots were filled up. Fine, whatever it was no big deal I was sure I would be able to find something for myself. Now as I started looking for leagues or teams to play on I had to take in consideration the fact that I had to sign up by myself and that I would need to bus myself around to all the diamonds. I finally settled on the Ottawa Sports and Social Club (OSSC). They had individual sign ups and I could easily enough get to the diamonds without insanely long bus rides. Win, win for me... or so I thought.

The organization's slogan is "Recess for Adults... Just Play" and apparently they take that quite literally. The first aspect of what has been bothering me with this whole baseball thing is that the fact that as an individual I had to pay $125 to play in this league (it is a whooping $990 for a team) and we do not even have real bases to use. I do not know about any of you, but back in elementary school and middle school or junior high depending on what term you use for it, we had these cheep plastic mat type bases to use if we wanted to play a game of baseball at recess or during gym class. Those bases are great for schools and for little kids to be using since more than likely they would get ridiculously abused. As adults playing and for the amount of money that I had to pay to play I want real bases, bases that actually come off the ground more than a couple millimeters.

The second thing that just does not seem right to me is that there is no organization at the game site, the teams just show up, place the bases where they think they might go and play. There is no type of officiating so any close calls could easily result in some sort of confrontation, and there has not been one member of the OSSC show up to help organize things at the diamond or just do whatever really. I really just cannot for the life of me wonder how they can get by doing this sort of thing, especially considering that this shit is not cheap and at the games we get like nothing to show for the money we have put in accept the fact that we have a field to play on.

Really is it too much to ask for to see some more worth out of the money it took to play in this league other than a place to play and cheap equipment that we had to put a deposit on before they would give us anything.

Those things bother me, they really do but what bothers me the most is my team. I have been playing baseball now for 18 years. 18. On the site where I signed up, there were two skill levels that were available. Recreational, and intermediate. Not wanting to get stuck with people who have never played baseball before or were extremely awful players I choose to sign up for intermediate. Since I signed up individually, I got put with other players who did the same thing and before we had our first game and before we had met each other we sent out mass emails back and forth for things like team name ideas, who wanted to be captain. Simple things. One person though, was curious as to what kind of experience everybody had when it came to playing baseball. As everybody responded and stating their credentials, I was impressed that people had been playing for ten, fifteen plus years. I was genuinely impressed at the time, thinking that this should be a pretty good team. Again I bet you can guess where this is going...

*sigh*

I should have not been so foolish as to think that many years of experience translates evenly into a person's actual level of skill. My bad.

I am not saying that I am some sort of all-star player, I am by no means close to that. However, the level of skill I have seen from my fellow teammates is dismal at best. When I signed up I was wanting to avoid this very level of hell really. Now to be fair, not everybody on the team is lacking the skill I would have come to expect from people who have been playing for so long but in a game of 3-pitch, where not only are the pitches a nice slow easy to hit underhand pitch but you get to pitch to your own team too and yet all anybody seems to be able to do is hit ground balls right at a player. It is pathetic! It is not all that bad considering that when I pitch I actually seem to be able to pitch well enough for people be able to hit the ball and we have been able to get consecutive decent hits and runners on the bases. Alas, I do not always get to pitch so everybody else who tries cannot seem to be able to grasp the simple concept of throwing a ball underhand into a specific zone across the plate. No, that would be too easy. Instead we get pitches that are too high, that land short of the plate or are either too inside, or too outside. It is not hard to pitch a good pitch, seriously.

If it was only just the whole pitching and hitting thing, I might be less likely to feel how I currently feel and that is in a fit of rage and fury and the overwhelming urge to hit something very very hard... hard enough to break my hand or repeatedly enough to leave my hand bloodied.

Today during my game, I was playing short stop and there was a simple, routine infield pop fly. It was right to the guy playing second base, he did not even have to move an inch for it and yet his glove was shaking all over the place, his knees were wobbling like he was going to fall over and in everybody's amazement (including his own) he caught the ball. Before I was even able to fully grasp how dumbfounded I was at seeing that he made a comment that that was the first pop fly he had ever caught. I wanted to cry after he said that. I just really do not understand how somebody who has been playing baseball for a reasonable portion of their life has never caught a pop fly before and furthermore how does somebody who has never caught a pop fly before feel like he is good enough to play in league that is supposed to be full with people who have some actual skill and not just dumb luck. That is all his catch was, was dumb luck, the guy closed his eyes!

Picture me yelling profanity at the top of my lungs while ripping my hair out and then taking a gun to blow my brains out, that is how I felt at the moment.

I could go on and on and on about how terribly pathetic this team is, and how nobody knows how or what they are doing while playing but I am not going to because the more I think about it the more I get angry, the more my rage builds up and honestly it does want to make me not only beat the pulp out of something but also cry too. It is just so unbelievably sad and I have just under three more months of this left.


A little extra tidbit of information for you folks, when I was writing this there was a considerable amount of profanity and swearing going on inside of my head but I felt like if I would have added it all my rant would have just been a bunch of non-coherent gibberish.