Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
This year’s vintage base ball game was remarkable. The weather was so hot I thought that I was going to faint when I slowed into second on a couple of doubles. The team had a few new faces but was as keen as ever and took both games after never winning a single game in the USA in the four previous seasons. Well, there was 2008 when the game was rained out. We declared that we had not lost by default.
It’s Sacket’s Harbor weekend and we are past the point of no return. I think I the team will actually have enough players and, except for playing from 10 am to 2 pm in the 90F heat with 100% humidity, it should be great. I will park on the bench. Shouting things. Waving my hands at outfielders who ignore me. I may chew on a cigar but all of mine are Cubans. Filthy habit anyway. Bought some before the RMC game and couldn’t give them away. Shared on a few nights later and felt like crap the whole next day. What the hell has happened to me?
There. Another week gone. Summer. Steak tonight. Bad banjo playing by the pool as I sip Belgian beer. That’s what I’m talking about.
A lovely day was had by all. Kingston St. Lawrence Vintage Base Ball Club loses 3-2 to a NY Selects team from Canton and Rochester NY in the final of the RMC tournament. RMC 1 lost to the Selects 7-6 in the first round while the KSL took RMC 2 by 17-3. I got a single.
What a run of attention getters. Taxes due. Election. Royal wedding. Osama killed. And what is most on your mind? The Royal Military College annual vintage base ball games, of course. This year, the Kingston St. Lawrence takes on RMC at the historic Cricket Fields in Kingston, site of actual pre-vintaged base ball in the 1870s. After all the stuff going around, there is nothing like the prospect of playing ball without a glove, the smell of the grass and the anticipation of a beer after. Bought a new bat. Sweet.
Gotta go. Going to take more of the day planning how to take this beard down to a long moustacheo. Don’t know whey I am having to make up manual bullets. Maybe it’s just Opera. Too lazy to check other browsers.
A big day. An idea I have helped frame has turned into a 26 person meeting. Yesterday, too, I had to report on work to a multi-level meeting with about as many people. I sat next to someone who crossed borders to get there and who has a profession utterly different from mine. But we chatted about stuff that help frame a big idea. I don’t know how my path got set out as it has but every since I started spending my time in big meetings about ideas that become neat things I have liked my job more. It reminds me of playing with Lego.
Gotta go. Gotta go play with the Lego of the mind.
Another great time was had by all even if we had to play 18 innings of 1864 rules baseball in a row on a 85 F day under the beating sun. The Kingston St. Lawrence VBBC tied the Sackets Harbor Ontarios 12-12 in the first game and lost 7-1 to the Genesee Nine of Rochester. Highlight was the nine run second inning in the first game. Low light was being on base and realizing I was not actually aware of the rules one needed to know when being on base. Got tagged out at home in the fourth inning of the second game. You know, one truly ought to give ‘er when one has the opportunity.
It’s been a weird week off. Chopped up. I even had to go to work but that was my fault. Didn’t check the schedule. Picked the wrong week. Assumed. But we carried on. A cold moved through but we carried on. Started in fine style at the Dinosaur BBQ, too. Vintage base ball coming up on Sunday. Spent the week being scared to hell by Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. Still ate bacon and green onion cream cheese on bagels from Ithaca Bakery. But I knew it was wrong. And exactly how wrong: real wrong.
Gotta go get the car in for a tune up. That outta spice things up.
I didn’t get the great shot like with other games. No photo of the instant before a ball is hit. No photo of hands outstretched. Thought I did get the actual money shot, above. Maybe it’s because we actually won and I spent my time screaming at the team to cover the gaps, not drift off the line and
rush around the bases. Turns out we don’t need to suck every game as the Kingston St. Lawrence Vintage Base Ball Club (“the Brown Stockings”) beat Royal Military College (“the Royals”) 41-3. That’s a lot. It was quite the thing. Took four seasons but a win… they can’t take that away. Sackets is doomed in July.
And a vintage base ball weekend. Just as I am getting to the point that I am not much use on the field anymore – as much from never actually having played baseball as being creaky – others are joining up who are actually good at the game. A cricketer even. Someone having the instinct to dive towards a line drive barehanded is pretty stunning to see. Me? Cricked neck and twinged back means the ball dropped near by. That could be a haiku.
Cricked neck and twinged back
Green grass, still play, a bat swings:
The ball falls too near.
Maybe we call it “Forty-seven”.
Maybe there will be another haiku entitled “So Many Aspirin” at the end of Saturday afternoon.
None
While I was over hobnobbing with the shaken and moved of the southern part of our Easlakian neighbo(u)rhood, I have actual stuff to do. Base ball stuff as I wanted to research the Watertown tournament of 1874 given that there were references to it in the Kingston papers of the time. I had thought that they went to play but in fact it appears that they went to watch as they are not listed as a team in the schedule.
Kingston’s rivals of the day, the Guelph Maple Leaf, win the event held in late June and early July over eight days before pop up here after for a game on 7 July 1874. But there are other notes that make it very curious:
Thrilling stuff. Need to do a little cross referencing but it looks like the Eastons of the 1870s may have been a rival to the Philadelphia Athletics which are now the Oakland A’s.
