With the arrival of an unpredictable mix of lengthy rains and muggy days with scattered beautiful days in between, the spring has arrived in New Jersey. For many fellow tribesman in the area, this means the arrival of softball season. Jewish men's softball has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. For years, Sundays from April to August meant, my father would drag me to an assortment of terrible manicured fields around Bergen County to watch him and his merry band of men play softball. The reason Jews go to softball is because they are not adept enough for baseball and I wouldn't trust a guy named Shlomo throwing a curve ball on Sundays morning at 8 AM.
It's a time of great reprieve. Jewish men from all over bargain with their wives for a little bit of free time on Sunday mornings to get in a bit of athletic activity (even though half the members of the team's have pinch runners). They take a break from child-rearing and bean counting to compete in a league full of evolving rules, average players, and consistently bad umpiring. For a long time, there were only two rules for admission to the league, you had to be over 18 and you had to be Jewish. That latter rule has long been avoided by some players since there is no circumcision test on the application and if there was, that would be real creepy. At a certain point, because of chronic mismanagement & favorable treatment to certain teams (usually related to who was running the league), the robust league over 20+ teams has become shrunk down to the mid-teens but if I keep going on the politics of a Jewish men's softball league I could digress eternally into an unreadable entry.
There is a quite the charm to the league. While a normal softball league will have standard team names like Sluggers, Killers or Madmen or just have a business name printed after a sponsor, the Jewish teams take another approach. The team names are primarily influenced by aspects of faith with defunct but classic team names like NYOTB (New Yids on the Block), the Minyanaires (my dad's old team), & the Ten Plagues. When I joined the league was the Mispuchah, my team's name (yiddish for family). the name came form an obvious place, my dad was influenced by having a few father/son & brother combination on the team. We wore yellow jerseys with black lettering that were reminiscent of the old 70's "We are Family" Pirates. Current team names include The Golems, The Moyals, the Mighty Menschen, & the Goniffs.
The team, at first, was full of 40 somethings trying to relive their glory days of sports tied by the bond of our communal synagogue like most teams. But eventually, we got competitive by adding younger, better players here and there while still maintaining our array of immobile players who either played catcher, EH (Extra Hitter, a softball-exclusive position) or sporadically playing a random position in the field like right field or second base with he hope that no one would hit them the ball or that they didn't screw up too much. As the Mispuchah, we won a few B-league championships (the A leagues are for the REALLLL Jewy Jews).
That's what a championship team looks like. I'm there somewhere.
Jewish softball is about hitting, kibbitzing, and complaining about calls from the piss poor umpires. I'm convinced their is some type of discrimination against the league or that, more likely, we pay the least for umpires so they send us the umpires worth the least (AKA worthless). Every call of almost every game seems to be challenged. Every decent play in the field is blown out of congratulatory proportions.
In a battle with one of the many bad umps.
So far this year has been quite uneven. Along with multiple rain outs, the captain of the team I play for (AKA my dad) called the Elite (which this team definitely isn't comprised of) has really outdone himself. The Elite won last year's C-Division Championship - a new low in Jewish Men's softball which was comprised of 6 of the worst softball teams you could imagine. This year we have a roster comprised over what must be 80 people. I think the captain forgot that only 10 people can play at a time and that old, cranky Jewish men are prone to complaining and slow to accept their deteriorating skill set. Just because a guy once led off and played left field 15 years ago doesn't mean at 55, he should do that over an in shape and skilled kid half his age but this is the type of quandary that seems to have to be dealt with on a weekly basis.
What do you do when 16 guys show up for 10 positions in a 6 inning game to a league with little league rules (everyone has play)? If you're our captain, you bat all 16 guys. It's completely ridiculous. It's unfathomable. While this appeases those who weren't going to play, it aggravates those who should be playing to the point that they no longer want to play. It's a perfect microcosm of the Jewish community at large. The old men ask why don't the young people get involved in the synagogue even though they are the ones squashing the enthusiasm of those young people to get involved to the point that they discard their community in favor of alternate activities involving people with interests that mesh with theirs.
In our last game, we won 4-2. For those of you, not familiar with softball, it is a high scoring version of baseball that usually has football scores rather than baseball scores unless you have good teams with very skilled defense. In our case, it was the futility in the two teams hitting. It was horrid. I would say 4 balls in the whole game left the infield besides errors, which were plentiful.
The biggest travesty is that the leagues is supposed to be more than a month in and still doesn't have a schedule. The schedule is posted every week for that week on a hideous website that used to play "Who's on First?" by Abbott & Costello and now has moved onto George Carlin 's "Baseball vs. Football" routine. Jews love their comedy but the league is the real joke.
So 2009 has arrived and the league is a still a joke. So why do I play? Because no matter how annoying it all is, it's fun to compete and usually it's good for a few laughs. The Elite are undefeated right now at 3-0. If you'd like you can follow along with our standings in the Greenberg Division (named after Hank).
Till next time, when we'll be talking Nazis on Facebook and much more, this has been the North Jersey Jew Report.
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