Last week I drove to Benton Harbor to play in a church league fastpitch softball game, and ever since then I cannot get out my mind this impossible hope of someday having a local church fastpitch league to play in again.
When I was fourteen, I played in my first fastpitch softball game, on my dad's church team at the Prairie Camp. In those days my church could field two full fastpitch teams. Because men who played softball played fastpitch softball. Since then I've had an overwhelming passion for the game. I love watching it played by the best players in the world where the pitching is virtually unhittable. I've played a few games with and against world class competition, but more often, these days, I play regularly on a travel league team that's middle of the pack.
But that's not my hope for the future of men's fastpitch. Playing in that church league game in Benton Harbor, which could only be described as the lowest levels of men's fastpitch, reminded me again that the lowest level of men's fastpitch--like a local start-up church league I daydream about--is both more fun and simply better than the highest level of slow pitch softball (where enormous, steroid charged, beer-chuggers hit blooped in pitches three hundred feet with $400 bats--how stupid).
Last night playing church league slow pitch softball at Cedar Road Missionary Church, all I could think about was how much more fun every player on both teams could be having if we stopped the game right where it was and declard that for the rest of the night and for the rest of the season we'd be playing fastpitch.
So what that no one really knows how to pitch; we'd learn. So what we don't have helmets--no one wore helmets to play softball until the late 1980s. So what we don't have any catchers gear...okay, maybe we'd need some catchers gear. And we'd need move the bases in to the correct distance and the pitching rubber would have to be moved forward.
None of these are impossible obstacles to overcome. All we need is the will to try it.
I'd even settle for a happy medium called "modified fast pitch".
