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Fun for some. Angst for others.
A visit to the two very different worlds of Yale postgraduate softball.
August 3, 2009
by Jake Keyes '10
Yale's undergraduate athletes—both varsity and
intramural—mostly abandon the campus's playing fields in the summer. But in their
absence another community of athletes endures: two softball leagues affiliated
with Yale professional schools and graduate departments.
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The French & astronomy departments’ CoRec team was called Frogs in Space.
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The teams represent various departments of the
university's schools and other institutions—political science, the investments
office, and the art gallery, for example. Players come to the leagues by many
paths, but most are grad students and university faculty. Some have played in
their league for decades. The teams are named with a nudge and a wink:
chemistry fields the Periodic Athletes, a team from the engineering school calls
itself the Ohm Runs, and players from the medical school are the Malpractice
Dodgers. Astronomy and French once fielded a joint team called Frogs in Space.
The two leagues are classified simply as
"recreational" ("Rec") and "co-ed recreational"
("CoRec"). Despite their names, both leagues are effectively co-ed,
and both are, technically, recreational. But our field research suggests that
the 4 Rec teams and the 19 CoRec teams play very different ball games.
In CoRec, the competition is all in good fun, as a
recent playoff on a field south of the horse barn showed. Along the left foul
line were the Mismatched Bases, representing the medical school's biological
and biomedical science program. Their opponent was a team called Balco's Finest
(named in homage to the infamous company that supplied steroids to big-leaguers).
The Bases weren't sure what department birthed Balco's. "They started as an
MB&B team," one speculates. "And physics," adds another. "We're
from all over," a Balco's player concedes when pressed.
There were pans of baked goods covered in foil
behind the team bench. "Time to test out my new glove!" someone called happily,
trotting out to take her position in the field. "If anyone wants to try some
dill-pickle sunflower seeds . . ." a player offered. A bag is handed
around.
There were pop-outs, swings-and-misses, explosions of laughter. Some of the
players were pretty good, and every now and then a line drive drew loud
approval from the sideline. At times the score wasn't clear: "Was that three runs,
or … ?" The playoff ended with a narrow Balco victory: 14–13.
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“The Rec league is where you come if you prefer competition to fun.”
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On another night on another field, in the shadow of the tennis stadium, another
pair of teams gathered. This was the "Rec" league. Women can play,
but they are few. Jake's Snakes represented the School of Medicine; their
younger-looking opponents were mostly in the physics department, though players
from the Divinity School, biology department, and other programs have trickled
in over the years.
Here the attitude was more solemn, even grim. Each
man on the Snakes arrived in uniform. The coach laid out 65-foot basepaths with
a length of measured rope. He carried a pen and took notes on a clipboard.
"This is where you come," one player joked, "if you prefer
competition to fun."
"How's it going?" someone called to the
coach. He was coming on along the sideline, lugging a duffel. "Oh,
God," he said, lowering himself into his lawn chair. "Ask me in an
hour and a half." He had an enormous digital camera set in the grass
beside his bag, but there would be no team photo unless the Snakes won.
Once the game began, the players hustled, gasping down the first-base line. Unlucky
hitters returned to the sideline, shaking downcast heads.
The innings ticked away, and, by three runs, the Snakes fell. This year there would
be no Rec championship for the School of Medicine. At the end of the evening
they sat in the grass unlacing their cleats. "Well," said a player,
pulling his cap lower on his brow. "There's nothing else we can say or
do." In a few minutes they were gone, picking their way across the open field towards the parking lot.  |
