Training Days

For an astonishing eight years now, Brooklyn's mighty Buttermilk Bar has sponsored one of the great joys of my New York existence: beers on tap. Also, they have very nicely agreed to pick up the New York City Parks Department field-registration fee for a long-running and very friendly intramural softball league/game that we know as Buttermilk Softball, and which will begin its ninth season at Ball Field Five at Prospect Park on Sunday. We are so official (not really that official) that we have an Internet Website of our own, which I write with WNYC mega-star and power-hitting corner infielder Joel Meyer, and I'm sorry I forgot how this sentence was supposed to end because I am just so excited to do this thing that I am honestly freaking out right now okay hold on a second. Hold on. All right.

All right. So, yeah: the teams change every week, with each side comprised of a combination of old (both physically and in terms of time-knowing-each-other) friends, random Prospect Park passers-by, the occasional BK tweenager, the occasional weird and very fancy Latin dude who doesn't believe in evolution and talks to you about it, and a bunch of former randoms who have become friends with the previously existing group of friends through Buttermilk Softball. We have made t-shirts and we have a blog that details -- occasionally in very great detail -- the goings-on in Buttermilk Softball. We're basically better organized than the Can-Am League, and many of our players are just as good. Sadly, we don't have the powerful brand of Rich Gedman to get us the notoriety we deserve, and also many of our players have moved away or given up or were called up to professional softball leagues. The last part is also not true. I am having a hard time telling the truth about Buttermilk Softball or writing coherently because I am too excited by the fact that on Sunday, July 11, we will play our first game of the season at Prospect Park's Field Five. It will also be one of just two games we play this season, for all the reasons I mentioned above except for the one involving Rich Gedman.

In honor of the long-awaited return of Buttermilk Softball -- well, long-awaited by me, at least -- I present a video of Cleo, my parents' very excitable puppy, working on her lateral movement and agility:



These drills are very difficult for humans to do, given that we are short two legs and two hundred thousand units of puppy energy. They're even more difficult to take good first-person video of:



Steady Blair Witching on fools. Apologies for any nausea or disorientation from that last one. If it makes you feel any better, any discomfort you're currently experiencing is nothing compared to how I'll feel after playing softball for the first time in a year.