Sunday, Clare had
to set her alarm for 5:30 AM or thereabouts in order to leave with the Valpo
softball team on their drive through the Indiana countryside to West Lafayette,
where they played Purdue and Ball State.
Too bad Purdue
didn’t have Roger Bossard or one of his kin working. The White Sox master groundskeeper knows how
to deal with rain. Just putting a tarp
on the infield won’t keep it dry; water has a way of going left and right as
well as down. In other words, the
infield was muddy after they took the tarp off.
That would explain why Clare didn’t get to her apartment until well past
6:30 PM. You live and learn.
I asked if she saw
any difference between Division I and III players. True to her D-III roots, Clare said, “Not too
much,” more depth of talent than anything else.
Officially, she helped keep charts.
All sports seem to have fallen under the spell of sabermetrics; no
pitch, no hit, no play is too trivial to keep track of. Unofficially, I’ll bet my daughter imagined
herself going up to bat every time a right-handed hitter stepped in. As they say, old habits die hard. And that may be part of the reason why Clare was
exhausted come evening.
Just so long as she
hit a few imaginary balls out, it was worth it.
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