It is my birthday.

For the past few months, inspired largely by my the desire to not be huffing and puffing my way through my Friday evening softball sessions, I have acquired some really fabulous habits (an addiction to running on the elliptical at the Y, uber-healthy eating, tracking my activity and food intake) and dropped some not so fabulous habits (eating out for lunch, consuming too many lattes, indulging in junk food, boozing, talking myself out of working out).

The results are pretty spectacular. I’m in the shape of my life, and I am positively chomping at the bit to take the field the moment the snow melts off the infield.

In the polar opposite of the spirit of Lent (which, as a Catholic like Miguel Cabrera I am celebrating), here’s a list of things I don’t want to give up.

What I want for Opening Day:

	1. New cleats. Mine have seen the beginning and end of 8 or 9 seasons now, which is at least 7 more than I expected to get when I bought them at Dunham’s for like 20 bucks to replace the Nikes that had replaced the white Reeboks that got me through high school. Something like these beauties would do nicely.
	2. A bat. My coach says my power will be unreal when I’m swinging a bat that’s got some pop to it. Now, people, I am 5 foot 2. According to various lame charts and whatnot on the interwebs, I am supposed to be slinging a hammer more appropriate for a toddler than Albert Pujols. But I didn’t earn the nickname Ryan Howard from my favorite teammate by slugging with a small, or even proportioned, bat. I’ll take this in a 34 inch, 28 ounce, please.
	3. Sweet, throwback high knee socks. I’m a little obsessed with the high-knee socks and of course, I love Brandon Inge. This year, how about switching out my normal navy and black for something a little more … 70s?
	4. Something to wear while watching the Tigers all summer long.
	5. A new tattoo. I pitched (har-de-har) my husband on the idea of a Joel Zumaya-esque ripple of flames somewhere on my midsection. I tried convincing him it would be a voodoo/Santeria-esque positive talisman that would keep Zumaya healthy and send the Tigers back to the Series, this time to win. He wasn’t a fan. But then again, he is traveling for work. . .
	6. Another year as effing stellar as this one. It might be a little odd for a 30+ married mother working in politics and living in a Big Ten university town to spend her weekends training for beer league ball&,dash;but it’s another, blessed thing entirely to have the family and friends to support such zany wishes, and awesome editors willing to toss you a little freelance work to offset the fees.

Happy birthday to me, pals. I’m skipping the cupcakes and hitting the trails, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Anticipating my own propensity to procrastinate, I’ve begun a list of what I want to accomplish in my training between now and my own Opening Day at Davis Park.

1. Learn to dive. This one cracks my husband (the natural athlete/soccer star/6-year-old state record holder) up. I was literally absent the day my high school team practiced diving, and now, as a 30-year-old, I need to catch up. I’m a bit apprehensive—when I reminded my coach, he said, “Oh, no, I have to put you through that?” Since my midsection and ribs have made it this far unscathed, I suppose it’s time for some gut checks—literally.
2. Buy new cleats. My current cleats have been stretched by years of playing outfield, where the grass is almost always wet. Over the past few months, I’ve done even more damage to them: the leather of the instep is shredding from dragging my right foot at the end of a throw, etc. And the actual cleats are worn down so far that I slipped a handful of times last season in the outfield. Now the only question is, which cleats do I buy? Obviously, the hot pink Jennie Finch Mizunos are out of the question. Why aren’t baseball cleats as cool as soccer cleats?
3. Run outdoors more often. Confession: I love the cardio machines at the YMCA, but the treadmill can suck it. Now that I’ve discovered how pleasurable it is to run outside when it’s above 20 degrees, I don’t think I’ll set foot on the blasted belt again. If all goes according to plan, I’ll start this season in shape and injury free—the first time I’ve been able to say that in, well, 12 years or more.
4. Master the inside out swing. Who knew Rod Allen wasn’t making things up when he showed us Miguel Cabrera’s “classic inside out swing” on all those slow motion replays? High, outside pitches have been my bread and butter for the past 4 seasons, but one benefit of finally learning how to REALLY swing a bat means I am also learning how to send an inside pitch opposite field. Last week I managed to send one tailing sharply into right, and my coach said, “That’s how the big boys hit.”

Between my “to-do” list and my training, I’m hoping I can tick a few items off my season-long list, like knocking one off the fence and hitting a stand-up triple.

Stand-up, of course, because I’ll want to keep the new cleats clean.

One of my goals this offseason (besides leaving the outfield behind and showing up all the other [male] third basemen in the league) was to accomplish something I haven’t done since high school: hit a triple. Another: to knock a pitch off the fence, with the hope of stretching it into an inside-the-park homerun.

Kirk Gibson was a huge proponent of the power of positive visualization (and he probably still is, and he’ll need it, taking over the Diamondbacks), and to that end, I’ve been lulling myself to sleep thinking through the steps of my swing: setup, load, buffer/hands, slot/hips, bat head through the zone, big tall finish.

My coach and I have talked about my approach at the plate this spring, which will differ substantially from my usual “swing at the first pitch” approach. Being that I’ve been the number four hitter for the majority of games in the past year, my first at-bat has got to count—I’ve got to be able to burn the outfielders with a pure power display to push them back against the fence and open the field for line drives, etc.

I can’t imagine a better beginning to the season than a hit like this.

Imagine how much more impressive it’ll be when it’s a 5-foot, 2-and-a-quarter-inch lightweight in a skirt rocking a pitch like that.

It’s atop my daydreaming list. Here’s hoping Gibby’s “see it, believe it, achieve it” makes it happen. Well, that and all the grueling hard work.

When I was in sixth grade—the last year I played Little League fast pitch softball before quitting until high school—my coach, Mr. Tersigni, would pile us all into the back of his Ford Bronco and take us to Dairy Queen after a win. While the experience of that last season and my volatile coach soured me on my sport for a few summers, Mr. T (who looked quite a bit like an out-of-shape Jose Canseco, plus mullet) imparted something I’d internalize.

He’d hit grounders at me until I stopped pulling a leg like an elephant avoiding a mouse, demanded I take the ball off the shin rather than give up the base hit.

2.

That last summer, I remember the lumps of my shins showing through socks and stirrups, the swollen contusions tender even when I stood still. I remember the way they bounced against each other in the back of the Bronco on the way to Dairy Queen, Mr. T turning up the radio and the whole team of 12 year old girls singing along to John (Cougar) Mellencamp:

Hurt so good
Come on baby, make it hurt so good
Sometimes love don’t feel like it should
You make it hurt so good

3.

My coach can’t get over how much better my hitting is when I swing freely instead of trying to muscle the ball. He doubles over laughing when I overthrow first and tell him I didn’t feel like I was throwing. “So you don’t believe you’re doing something right unless you can feel it?”

Close. Unless it hurts.

4.

A brief history of softball-related injuries:

Summer 2002, 75 percent tear of right quad
Summer 2003, concussion and whiplash
Spring 2004, left triceps, hip and outer thigh covered in contusions
Summer 2009, high ankle sprain
Winter 2009/Spring 2010 deep bone contusion (lower ankle), ankle sprain*
Fall 2010/Winter2010/Early Spring 2011assorted bruises

*soccer related

5.

Sometimes, it doesn’t even hurt. It just bleeds.

6.

Sometimes, it doesn’t bleed. Well, it bleeds under the skin.

7.

The narrative here isn’t lost on me: that a man taught me something I loved would cause me pain, by definition, because it hurts when you do things the right way. You give up the body, you give up the ghost. If love is baseball and baseball hurts, if a=b and b=c, then a=c and love hurts.

8.

I don’t know how much of the project is about unlearning the bad lessons men taught me about baseball, and how much is about unlearning the bad lessons men taught me.

9.

“When you’re doing it right, it shouldn’t hurt. You shouldn’t even feel it.”

“For young boys it is culturally acceptable and politically correct to develop these skills,” says Linda Wells, of the Arizona State softball team. “They are mentored and networked. Usually girls are not coached at all, or are coached by Mom—or if it’s by Dad, he may not be much of an athlete. Girls are often stuck with the bottom of the male talent pool as examples. I would argue that rather than learning to ‘throw like a girl,’ they learn to throw like poor male athletes. I say that a bad throw is ‘throwing like an old man.’ This is not gender, it’s acculturation.”

2.
Confession: I play softball in a skirt. A running skirt, to be precise, and it’s positively the most comfortable, least restrictive article of clothing I own. (I have a nice pair of softball pants—black, always worn pulled up to the knee—but they make me feel somehow like the Tin Man; I can’t bend correctly at the waist. I only wear them when it’s too cold for anything else.)

Anyhow, I’m becoming accustomed to the strange looks I draw when I drop my bat and bag and start stretching as my coach is finishing up with the young man who takes lessons before me. I suppose I’d just attributed it to the skirt.

3.
We’ve already talked about my throw. It’s never been girly. Now, it’s even less so.

4.
This week, the young man’s father, a chatty BS-er who’s always ribbing his son and the coach, said something to the effect of, “You teach softball too?”

Now, before we continue, I have to say, I couldn’t tell if the question was one of derision. I could not tell if he meant it as a slight to my coach, as though somehow he was making easy money by working with me. As though he were less manly for teaching a girl’s sport, something I saw all the time when the men coaching women’s sports in high school were dismissed as shitty coaches because a real coach would coach men.

All I know is that it made me a bit mad.

5.
Because a woman playing a sport seriously, even if somewhat ridiculously (i.e. a 30-year-old woman spending her Friday nights taking grounders and tearing her palms open in the cages), doesn’t seem to me to be preposterous.

As in, boys can take baseball lessons. So why is it weird for me to do the same?

6.
My coach, who I will forever high-five for this, said, “Nope,” then explained that he was giving me baseball lessons with bigger balls. He added that I’m his only female client, and he took me on because I asked.

I realize I was standing there in a skirt, but it doesn’t sit well with me to have someone speak about me in front of me. It reminds me of being a child and having the doctor explain what’s wrong with you to your mother, even though you’re sitting right there.

So I told the father that this was just my mid-life crisis, but quite a bit early. Then I stepped into the cages and started taking my swings.

7.
Reading the Fallows piece, I started remembering things I’d seen, but been too exhausted—or too hellbent on making a perfect throw—to fully process.

Last week it was a crowd of older men who had just dropped their kids off at the bounce-house place next door, making sort of cat-call, sort of awe-struck noises as I was hitting. Think more “Hey-O!” and less “Oh, wow.”

But thinking back, it seemed like they were half shocked that I was hitting so well (they shouldn’t have been; my coach is amazing) and half like they were offering some smarmy play-by-play to each other, the kind you half-hear walking by a crowd of drunk 40-year-olds.

8.
Look, I get that it’s a bit of a spectacle. The parents have never seen a girl taking lessons. The bored adults waiting for the kids to finish bouncing their brains silly in the bounce house emporium wander over to the field and are not expecting to see a girl in a skirt taking grounders or crushing the ball. I get it.

But do they do the same thing, act the same way, when it’s a boy? What would they do if it were their daughter?

9.
The other possibility: I read the Fallows piece, and became overly sensitive (“girly”) about something that wasn’t even about me. Like a hyper-reactive feminist with a very self-centered world view.

10.
It’s a lifetime of the same pattern, though. Time after time, making a cogent argument about an athlete or some sporting issue in the presence of men is not taken as another fan entering the debate, but as some type of exhibition that must be possessed. As though I’m doing it to get men’s attention. (I’m not, I’m married.) As though that were the trick. As though a woman cannot love baseball, unless she loves it to get a man.

11.
My freshman year of high school, we were bussed out to Durand with the boys’ freshman team. The boys, it turned out, didn’t have an opponent. Midway through the first game, the umpire suggested to our, Mr. Young, that we play to five innings and skip the second game to accommodate the boys. Mr. Young went nuclear.

He came back to the dugout and told us, “Don’t you ever let someone treat you differently just because you’re a girl.”

12.
In co-ed, rec league softball, girls are pitched a smaller ball. My coach, from day one, has been pitching me the boy balls. But we just call them what they are: the big balls. Because girls can have them too.

My good friend Maggie, who rediscovered her swing the first year I played on her team, said she can always hear her father, good old Ray Striz, telling her to keep her back elbow up when she settles into her stance at the plate.

But that’s all wrong. So is the generic, unhelpful advice to “stay back.”

Let’s start with swinging level. When I was an up-and-comer (read: sixth-grade fast-pitch Little-Leaguer), the chant from the bench was this: Swing level, swing level, and run like the devil. And that’s fine advice, if your goal is to hit grounders or line drives that don’t clear the infield and are easily nabbed by the shortstop.

In fact, the path your swing should take is more like a hula hoop tilted skyward at the finish, pointing toward the catcher’s mask at the low end. Imagine, as I do, the rings of Saturn, turned up 45 degrees.

In making contact with the ball—getting under it, as Rod Allen would note—while swinging on an upward track above level, you’re going to put the ball in the air, leading to either greater power and distance if you’re a power hitter, or better base-hit line drives if you’re my size. Which is, to be clear, 5-foot-2 and not very beefy.

When you finish your swing, your bat should be hitting you at the very top of your leading shoulder—in my case, my left shoulder, as I am a righty.

Take a look at my high school photo. Notice anything funny? Look at my wrists. My top hand has rolled over the bottom as I finish my swing, which is the telltale sign that you’re swinging level to a fault. It meant a lot of easy grounders, and an inability to consistently put the ball in the air unless I got a pitch that was already high, and forced me to get under it.

Here’s where the back elbow comes in. Keeping it up doesn’t help you, my coach says, unless you’re Ken Griffey Jr. In which case, you probably aren’t spending your Friday evenings getting drilled with grounders and taking hundreds of swings in the cages.

How can millions of American fathers have been so wrong? Because it’s actually not so much about the back arm—and elbow—as the front arm, and getting your hands through the zone—with the bat lagging back—before you push through with the final burst: stiffening the front leg, exploding through the hips and completing that upward arc.

Need a visual? This is about as good as it gets:

When I walk onto the field this spring, I want people to mistake my swing for Miguel Cabrera’s. And, as long as we’re wishing for insanely unlikely things, my hair, too.

I believe in being five
my father teaching me to throw
in the backyard/ our house on Crescent Avenue:
sidearm
hard
almost no arc on the ball
watched it tail

as a ten inch comet
to my father’s open mitt.

From FOR TIM (suggesting I name ten things I truly believe, which is really fucking impossible)

I love my dad. My dad taught me to play baseball. I love my dad, and baseball, so much that I have nearly completed a book of poems about baseball. And my dad.

And my dad must love me a lot, too, in that way I see my husband loving our daughter—stuck somewhere between desperately attempting to keep said daughter in line, correcting her missteps, perfecting her; all without breaking her, or making her feel worthless, or, hell, even just pissing her off until she stomps her little foot and you are now oscillating somewhere between anger (she must get that attitude from her mother!) and even more love (maybe I should just give her a hug).

I’ve always thrown sidearm—because my dad taught me that way. The rarity of it has made me resistant to change: there are a handful of sidearm pitchers—all relievers, I believe—but no sidearm-throwing fielders. And certainly, I’ve never in my life witnessed another girl cranking her body side-to-side to leverage the torque to uncoil and get a runner at third.

It made me feel like a gunslinger. And my dad, the John Wayne fan, must have known better than to try to fix it.

But there are obviously problems with it. First, there’s an incredible amount of tailing action on the ball. So while I may, say, be reasonably accurate on infield throws, coming up gunning from the outfield means my infielder needs to be ready to adjust.

Mechanically, it’s a nightmare—it’s just about the opposite of the exact right way to throw a ball. A good throw would be something like the Yankee’s Brett Gardner: coming over the top of the ball, snapping the elbow, a bit of snap to finish in the wrist, pulling the chest forward and toward the lead knee.

What was I doing? I was creating lateral rotation—think, the strange spinning handheld drum contraption from Karate Kid Part 2—to power my throw.

You can see this in the photo of me throwing from my high school days. There’s almost no work, in the physics sense, being done by my elbow. My wrist served as a rudder at best. And my chest never moved forward, into the proper finishing position, because I needed to prematurely abort my rotation—of the wrong axis—or risk throwing behind me; I needed to stay back, when proper form (and my current coach) dictate the opposite.

The rub is this: with such a mechanically unsound throw, I managed to grow into a decent outfielder (if not at times showing flashes of my idol, Bobby Higginson, by punishing runners who dared to tag up on me) but the ones that got away—those were the problems.

Mr. Plants, who coached me for two years in high school, tried in vain to correct my throw. The middling result came about from his knowing only about half the proper mechanics of a fundamentally sound throw—”thumb the ball past your thigh” “point to the target with your elbow”—and caused some unnamed injury that found me in right field, unable to lift my arm above my elbow, so severe was the pain in the joint of my shoulder, a handful of glass-covered pickaxes grinding.

So now, a few sessions in, one of the targeted improvements of my game (one of many, I assure you) is fixing, once and for all, this throw of mine.

But it’s not without a bit of sadness, a bit of nostalgia tingeing the memory of each coach I ever played for furrowing his brow and turning his head a bit, the memory of my father explaining to them that was just how I did it, that was how he taught me, all of it dimmed a bit in a wash of sepia.

It’s a bit like the memory of the last cigarette I smoked, knowing it was just that, paying more attention than ever to the smoke hanging just in front of my cheeks, for once not waving my hand through it, for once, not wanting it to disappear.

“He’s got a mean streak,” says his manager, Sparky Anderson. “As mean as Pete Rose. That’s saying the best thing that could be said about a ballplayer.”

There are a lot of weak aspects to my game – hence hiring a coach to convert me into a real, badass third baseman, aka #Project3B.

But despite my affinity for miming the Rocky training sequence, my adoration of complete badasses like Brian Wilson, and my freakish ability to not notice somewhat hardcore injuries until well after the fact, I still have a hard time with my game face.

Last Friday, I convinced (read: asked a few times, sweetly) my best friend Debbie, to join me in my #Project3B shenanigans. Of course, I had ulterior motives, including expanding the range of awesome milady performs on the field this summer.

Whereas the first lesson, I was Too. Fucking. Exhausted. to perform my standard “can’t go more than five minutes without cracking jokes” act (at least they’re funny, I’m told), Debbie’s presence was fabulous in a few awesome ways. First, I wasn’t the only one performing the drills, so I wasn’t So. Fucking. Exhausted. so fast. (Also, we learned that Debbie has a wicked arm and can field well. Holla, all-girl infield!)

The downside: Debbie and I, who used to say (ok, really, still DO) “That’s what she said” (I know, how original) so often that my then-4-year-old started saying it at school, had a nearly impossible time holding back.

Coach: “Don’t get lazy, A, keep your ass down!”
Angela: Fields grounder (barely), mutters under breath, “That’s what she said.”
Debbie: (Quietly) Actually, that’s what he said.

I mean, yeah. Maybe it’s conditioned, partly, in girls—even girls like me, who regularly wear 3 to 4-inch heels, drink scotch, smoke cigars and are told by male friends, “You’re like a man in a hot chick’s body”—to take direction well from men with authority but feel the need to offset it with a giggle.

(I have also been known to respond to internal work emails with a well-timed “That’s what she said” as well.)

But it all begs the question: can I become a great (or hell, just plain better than 80% of my competitors) co-ed beer-league softball infielder if I can’t be “mean” like Gibby—if I’m more likely to bite my cheeks to keep from guffawing when my coach, fixing my swing (another catastrophe, to be explored next week) says, “Don’t get stiff too early?”

I don’t know what it all means, kids. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for me to be more “Hearts on Fire” and less Weird Al’s “I’m Fat,” but it’s safe to say it’s more than two sessions with the coach. Whose nice silver watch, incidentally, helps me focus when I’m trying to override my inane urges.

(That’s what she said.)

I don’t have time to be angry away from the field. So I brush it off, bottle it up and drink a tall glass of it before taking the mound.
—Brian Wilson, Giants closer and general badass

When I was a kid, the standard-bearer for bad-ass preparation tactics was the Siberian training montage in Rocky IV.

My brother and I would string a jump rope across the living room and mimic the uppercut practice while playing “Hearts on Fire” on repeat.

Naturally, when I decided—admittedly, after many large chalices of beer at Art’s, a local bar—that I would hire a coach to transform me from a decent-to-good centerfielder into a larger than life third baseman, I pled my case to my husband thusly: “I can’t be Rocky without a Mickey.”

A few keystrokes into Google, I struck gold. It turns out the indoor soccer arena near my home houses the Lansing Hit Club, a travel team and associated instructional organization. If you scroll down, you’ll see my coach, Justin Pierce. He must be cool, because he agreed to coach a 30-year-old woman. Also, he’s huge. That, or I’m just the size of the pre-teens he regularly coaches.

People, it is Monday afternoon and I am still sore. People, when I ran 8 miles in July, I wasn’t as exhausted as I was after the first round of drills. People: It. Was. Fucking. Sweet.

How sweet? So sweet that when I took off the batting glove I wear under my mitt, it was sticky—because I blew out my index fingernail and it was bleeding. So sweet that I didn’t flinch when I misjudged a short-hop grounder (which, coach says, “you have to charge that, Angela”) and took it off the muscle just below my clavicle. Three bruises, one bloodied fingertip, many sore muscles (I figure I did the equivalent of one billion squats) and copious pints of Two Hearted later, I’m hooked.

Some immediate takeaways: Throwing sidearm, my go-to for tosses when I’m tired or rushed, is no longer permitted. We’re moving to an over-the-top motion, which cuts down on the tailing action of a throw over longer distances and, frankly, is way easier.

The fielding fundamentals I’m learning at third are just mind-bogglingly fabulous. (You’ll get a whole column on this soon.) Some early winners: You “creep” into position instead of hunkering down, so you’ve always got momentum. You approach the ball in a way that carries you toward first, making the throw easier and more accurate. And, the real money trick: judging one- and two-hop grounders.

We’ll also be videoing my batting, which I’ll hopefully be able to post here.

Everyone needs goals, and since I don’t really have an enemy whose picture I can tuck into the edge of my mirror and then slowly crumple just before we face off in April, these are mine:

1. I want to hit a triple.
2. I want to hit a home run.
3. I want to be a better third baseman than at least 80 percent of my counterparts in the two leagues I play in. Especially since “girl at third” = bull’s eye, I want to make it clear that my defense is not to be tested. Unless you want to be out.

I’ll be tweeting my softball adventures and misadventures with the hashtag #Project3B; you can follow me @motheroflight. Look for updates on Fridays.

I have been a centerfielder for much of the time since returning to Lansing’s beer league co-ed rec division post-the birth of my daughter. For the most part, I have enjoyed it—even reveled in it.

Bo knows avascular necrosis.

I’m looking for a new challenge. Or looking to recapture the potential I had in my youngest days, when my first fast-pitch coaches would place me at third (which then seemed insulting, as we all wanted to play first) because I had the arm, even then, to make the throw. (Even then, I was tossing the ball with a modified sidearm motion.)

I did play most of one co-ed season—my first back in action—at third. That wasn’t a particularly shining effort, but now I’m ready to give it the old Little League try all over again.

It’s time to start training. (Heck, it’ll also lead to some great blog fodder, right?) Beginning as soon as I find a willing trainer (the Mickey to my Rocky), I am spending the off-season fielding grounders, learning to dive (eek!) and, really, hoping to make myself the most Brandon Inge-like 3B in a skirt in Lansing.

Aside from ordering the Tom Emanski videos, what should I do? Who should be my Mickey? How do I become a great co-ed 3B? What else do I need to do?

Answers, please. This is going to be painful either way—but perhaps I can augment that with just a little fun.