At 31 years old, I’ve come to the realization that I’m not a spring chicken anymore. That being said, I wouldn’t call myself “old,” unless I was comparing myself to the crowd at Governor’s Ball. On Sunday, however, I felt every bit the geriatric ward resident at the place I was most afraid of it happening: the baseball field.
For the last 10 years, my buddies and I have spent most of our weekends in the spring and summer lacing up our cleats to compete in one of New York City’s adult baseball leagues. In that time, I’ve seen us grow from a team filled with young, post-college upstarts into a ballclub stacked with wizened vets who get by on guile more than athleticism.
But Sunday, man, did we look old.
We’ve gotten off to a good start this year. We came into the weekend 9-2, fresh from beating a couple of hurlers who spent the last few years pitching in the minor leagues. But this weekend, we squared off against the kryptonite of just about anyone over 25 years old: teenagers.
I knew we were in trouble as soon as we got to the field. We straggled into the park about 45 minutes before game time, which is about as much time as we normally need to stretch and cajole our aching joints into something resembling baseball shape. But our opponents, average age 18, had been there for over an hour, playing a pickup game before we were set to play a double header.
They spryly bounced around the turf, chattering loudly, whipping the ball around the infield. It was way too much energy for someone my age to see that early in the morning.
The game played out pretty predictably: they just never let up.
Every time they got on base, they’d take another, forcing our catcher—who’s squatted behind the plate for 95 percent of the 2,100 innings we’ve played in the last decade—to throw over and over again with a labrum he hasn’t had since 2012.
Even when we took the lead, nothing could dampen their enthusiasm. They simply put together good at-bat after good at-bat, tiring out our aged pitching staff, myself included, until they ended up coming out on top in both games.
But our humiliation on the field was nothing compared to the way we felt afterward.
On Monday, I was too sore to tie my shoes. Our catcher said he was typing left-handed at work, as the pain in his shoulder had his throwing arm dangling uselessly at his desk. Our first baseman, whose balky hamstrings once again became an issue during a rundown play, worked from home, as he was unwilling—or unable—to get off his couch in the morning.
We’d been beaten by better teams, but never by teams who simply “out-youthed” us. It was a sobering moment, indeed.
But the great thing about playing once a week is that old guys like us have plenty of time to recover. The next time we play these whippersnappers will be in June. We’ll know their tendencies, remember what they did last weekend and hopefully use our minds to strike a winning blow for all the geezers out there.
Or maybe we’ll just get lucky and they’ll all be at Randall’s Island, grooving to Kanye.
