In the Box

Patience is a virtue as many people say, and they might just be right. Patience is needed in many things in life, even the smallest things that you might not realize. I play softball for a travel team in Maine and we have many tournaments over the summer. In softball you have to have a lot of patience whether you are on offense or deffense. If you don´t have patience while on defense, you could make a bad throw and now you have runners at home. But I am not talking about defense today, I want to focus on offense. Hitting is one of the best parts of the game, that´s how you score. If you don´t hit you don´t score. When you are up, you have to have so much patience. There was one time this summer during one of our games, and this game was very important. If we won that game we would go to the championship. And that was our first time going that far all summer.

At the start of the game the other team started their best pitcher, as did we–everyone does. Anyways, she had been pitching all day Saturday and it was now Sunday. As the day went on, she grew tired. At this point in time, my whole team had timed her up and were getting solid hits off of her, but then they changed pitchers. It was the 5th inning and they pulled her from pitching. The other team had put in their second pitcher, who had only been pitching for one year and was not the strongest girl to step on the mound, but they had no other choice. The umpires gave her a couple of pitches to warm up and while she was, my whole team was watching her, getting ready to have to change our swings. She was much slower than their starting pitcher and that made it difficult to time her up. The key to timing up a slow pitcher is to sit up in the box and choke up on the bat. From an outside perspective you would think that it is not that hard to change from a pitcher throwing at a speed of 55 to a girl throwing meatballs at a speed of 23. That compares to trying to hit a change up every pitch.

The time had passed and the second pitcher was done warming up. I was on deck and my teammate was up to bat. The first pitch went by. Strike! the second pitch went by. Strike! And finally the last pitch came lobbing in right down the middle. Strike! She was out and it was my turn to bat. I was nervous as I always am when I go up to bat. I got to the box and I could hear and feel my heart beating while looking at my coach for the sign he was going to give me. This pitcher was much slower, so I was way up in the box. I was given the red sign which means do not swing, watch the first pitch go by, so I did. The second pitch came in and I swung, I missed. I didn´t wait long enough before I started swinging, and so when the ball came in I missed. Now that I knew what to expect, I could wait. I was in my head and all the cheering and screaming was foggy sounding. I knew what I needed to do and that was to wait. I need to have patience.

The sun was in my eyes and I had a headache from squinting, everything felt like it was moving in slow motion. Dust was flying by my eyes and the grass was flowing. The pitcher was winding up and I was ready. The pitch came in and I swung, this time making contact. The ball went flying to the outfield as I ran around the bases, I made it to third before I had to stop. A triple, I had just hit a triple off a pitcher who throws meatballs right down the middle. The batter after me got on base and I got home scoring a run. When I got back into the dugout, my team was asking what advice I had for them for when they are in the box. All I could give them was that they needed to be patient.

“Batter’s box” by Curtis Cronn is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.