MPR Softball 20th Anniversary Season

[Men's team: 5 - 5]

“We came, we saw… whatever.”

Well, it’s been a quiet year for the MPR softball team… like hell! The Y2K edition of the little team that time forgot featured a bumper crop of rookies who brought intensity, enthusiasm, and a capacity for beer consumption that the old-timers could only observe with wry nostalgia before tottering home to survey their dwindling supplies of rheumatism pills. As they drifted off to their fitful elderly slumbers, many of them could be heard murmuring, “I wonder how you get on one of those Mark Dayton bus trips to Canada…” And yet these same decrepit, cranky, crackle-jointed geezers managed to defeat their gazelle-like younger teammates in the renewed Old Fart/Young Pup season-ending contest. If there’s an explanation, the Historian has declined to share it with this humble scribe.

Other 2000 highlights: The team experienced only the second tie game in its history, an 8-inning nail-biter that, strangely enough, was not anything like kissing your sister… The team took second place in the one-day league tourney held in June, winning $100 and screwing up its amateur status just in time for the Olympics… During the tournament in August, all sorts of stuff happened. The team played for approximately seven straight hours in blinding heat and humidity with nary a pause for water, analgesics, or the all-important re-application of deodorant. Bill Wareham, normally a Gandhi-esque figure of calm and nonviolence, got himself tossed from a game for daring to question the umpire’s intelligence and judgment. The MPR squad made a remarkable comeback against a team that was thoroughly convinced they’d won, roaring back in the last inning to wipe the smirks off their faces. And on the topic of, um, wiping - Linda Wareham was observed delicately providing Tom Scheck with first aid for an abrasion (suffered while gallantly sliding into third base) in a rather inconvenient and difficult-to-access location. All who witnessed this incredible act of human kindness have been haunted by it ever since… And finally, the Historian is happy to report that it has now been over two years since anyone on the MPR team has abandoned a child in a tavern.

The Wick Shrieking Tournament Teens

The Historian has dictated the following congratulatory remark: “Thanks, everyone, for 20 great years of softball. Notice I didn’t say 20 years of great softball. Let’s not kid ourselves. But thanks. You’re a great group, and hey, all those bloops and squibbers and cue shots look like line drives in the scorebook. Play ball!”