#528 Ricochet

It’s baseball season.
Many of my friends talk about little else. I spent a lot of time playing baseball as a youth and even more time as a scorekeeper and announcer.
So, um, I’m kind of sick of baseball.
That was back in the day when kids used wooden bats. My friend Bobby pointed out the other day that he’d read an article which bemoaned the fact that it was possible for star players to make it all the way through little league and college and never have swung a wooden bat.
Which is the only bat they allow in the majors.
Promising careers cut off because of aluminum, competing bat lobbies, and fears of splintered bats flying back to the mound to bean pitchers.
Which, by the way, I witnessed as a youth.
The pitcher did okay. What scared him most was dodging both the incoming ball and the bat shrapnel. The laws of conservation of energy saved him. Neither bat nor ball had as much power because they had to split the kinetic force.
So the pitcher’s worst injury was compound whiplash from double ducking.
My dad must have worried that would happen to me because he used to “toughen” me up with a hardball.
Throw skipping grounders and burn balls at me when I was 7 years old. I was a nerd and a klutz, and to top it all off, slow and clumsy.
Took a ground ball in the front tooth once. Fresh new permanent tooth too.
Got a nice permanent chip in it.
I told myself this man must love me.
I mean, after all, he was throwing hardballs at me at incredible speeds.
That’s how men love each other, right?
And, hey, a broken tooth made me look tough didn’t it?
Even today, I can’t help loving people who throw hard objects my way.
How does that saying go, what doesn’t kill you makes your teeth look funny?
No, what doesn’t kill you makes you look dorkier?
No, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That’s it.
I hear four out of five dentists prefer neither wood nor aluminum bats. They just like baseball.
America ya gotta love it