My Baseball Tale

I seems as if the blog is being dominated by Baseball stories, so I thought I would use my first posting to tell one of my own.
My tale starts in the sixth grade. I was not the most lithe of children and as such was not picked to participate in many sports related activities. So when I recieved the sign up sheet to play baseball for the very first time, I was overjoyed. I ran straight home to get my mom to sign my permision slip so I could start playing ball the following week.
I was relieved to find that my mom was more than happy to sign my slip. Usually she would just take a drag off her cigerette and tell me that I couldnt do it because there was probably going to be some hidden charge. I wasn't about to question her when she handed over the signed paper.
The next day I held my head up high as I presented my teacher with my cheeto stained permission slip. She looked the paper over and then said "Oh how nice. I see your mother has signed up to be a coach."
I was dumb struck. The only physical activity I had ever seen my mother do was to point me in the direction of her purse so I could get her another smoke, and now she was going to be teaching me and 8 other kids how to play baseball. Uhggg
When I got home I found my mom flipping through two books on how to play baseball that she had checked out from the library. She admitted to knowing absolutley nothing about the game, but she felt that she could learn enough from the books to teach us a "thing or two". She then proceeded to fall asleep in the chair while reading the first chapter.

The first day of practice was horrible. The chapter that she had read had shown her how to make wrist strengthening devices out of old rock filled socks attached to a stick with some twine. This being the only chapter she read she made the team do these wrist rolls for what seemed to be hours. After that she suggested that we each give ourselves nicknames to put on the back of our shirts. Without getting my input, she told everyone that my nickname was going to be "Cookie", because I liked to cook.

The next practice was more dirty sock rolls, and the official decision on what names were going on the back of our shirts. The other kids felt that "Cookie" was a great name for me, but that they would just like to have their real last names on the shirts.

By the third practice all of our wrists hurt from the sock rolls, and the kids were getting restless because we hadn't even touched a ball yet. One of the boys fathers having seen enough sock rolling, grabbed a bat and ball and started hitting grounders to us. My mom was furious. She asked the father what he thought he was doing, and he said "Actually practicing" and then my mom said "Fine, then you can do it without me!! Come on Cookie."

And that my friends is the first ever time I got to be part of a baseball team. It doesn't quite bring back the same fond memories as your stories, but it does hold a place in my heart.