Brian Dislikes Baseball Practice

Baseball practice started yesterday for me. That's a sure sign of spring, so it always makes me happy. A few of us get together and we throw the ball around, and we hit. Then we leave. It doesn't take too long, and it always reminds me of one thing, the fact that I am extremely thankful that I don't have to endure daily baseball practices anymore.

Although I love baseball itself, baseball practice is right up there with wading penis-deep into a pool of electric eels. There may not be a more boring sport to practice, especially in the winter, in the North.

Baseball practice in the winter in the North means that you have to find a dome or a fieldhouse or something to practice in which is dumb thing #1. You can't throw as far, you have to hit in a cage so you can't watch the balls fly, and there are invariably other sports teams practicing near you, so you're constantly squeezed for space.

Have you ever run to catch a fly ball and smashed into a track girl running hurdles? I have.

Have you ever hit a softball player in her ample buttocks with an errant throw? I have.

Have you ever tripped over the Associate Athletic Director while running sprints and then yelled at him to "get his fat ass out of the way" and then been punished by having to run more sprints until your legs felt like they were going to fall off and you felt like you were going to take a big involuntary diarrhea in Lane 6? I have done this as well.

All this makes me very glad that I don't have daily baseball practices anymore. You know what else I won't miss?

-Practicing at 6:00 AM and having a fly ball hit me directly in the head because I was still a little loopy from the bar the night before.

-Practicing at 10:00 PM and not being able to get to sleep until 2 in the morning and then stumbling into class at 9 AM looking like I'd stayed up all night shooting meth rectally with Courtney Love.

-Running stairs at the DakotaDome. This was a form of conditioning, and also a way to keep us from smashing into other sports athletes because nobody else practiced on the stairs. Usually about once a year somebody would trip and fall into the row of seats below and get a really big bruise. That was the highlight.

-Other forms of conditioning. I never understood why we had to run so much for baseball. Isn't 360 feet the farthest we'd ever have to run without stopping? Apparently, we were training for the time when we had to play in a desert with no fences that sloped downwards for 4 straight miles. Some of our players couldn't hit a ball more than 25% of the time, but they could sure post a great 10K.

-Constantly deferring to the women's basketball team. I know they were the revenue sport and we weren't but still, I could have assembled a team that would have beat them 100-4. I shouldn't have to wait for anything for anybody I could whoop that bad at anything.

So thank you to the Gods of things that are fair and just for not making go through baseball practice very often anymore, because it's very likely that I would have sawed off the head of some unsuspecting athlete by now, and that just ain't how I like to roll.