As those of you who are familiar with me know, I am currently playing baseball for my high school legion team. Overall, it's been a rewarding and enjoyful experience, culminating with me making varsity this summer. However, there are the bad times and the good times to everything, and this is one of those embarassing experiences. Hope you get a good laugh out of this.
Disclaimer: The following event is 100% fact
My teammates are snickering at me from the bench. I'm the youngest guy on the team, so I get a lot of crap from the older guys. Their latest passtime is trying to get me to "come out of the closet." FYI: There is no closet. I'm straight (I hope). Anyway, down to business.
I step into the batter's box, get set, and await the next pitch. The pitcher is a tall, lanky right-hander - just the kind of pitcher I like. But it doesn't matter. I have the take sign. The ball whizzes on right under my hands, ball one. Aw nuts! That means I have to take again, since I'm supposed to take until I get a strike. A second time the ball speeds in - this time it's a strike down the middle. Good. That means I can swing at the next pitch.
The pitcher gets his signs from the catcher. Then he shifts his hands around in his glove, obviously changing his grip. Well good. That means there's an off speed pitch coming. I can feel the anticipation in every bone of my body. The lanky hurler, winds, throws, and just as I suspected, a curve ball on the inside corner. The pitch looks as big as a watermelon. Remembering to keep my wait back, I tense, coil, and explode! I hit the ball.....
.....Right off of my shoe and into my groin. I do have a cup on, but cups only protect getting hit from the front - not the bottom. Which meant cup got jarred up against one of my more sensitive areas. It hurts. I keel over in pain. More snickers from the blasted dugout. I step out of the batter's box, and begin walking around, trying to soothe the burning in my nether regions.
But my humiliation doesn't end here. My coach serenly walks over and tells me to lie down. A little mystified, but knowing that refusal will probably "get my ass run," I comply. The coach promptly lifts my legs over my head, putting me in the fetal position, and starts to move my legs back and forth. Now, this did start to ease the pain, but that's beside the point. From a certain angle - no, from any angle, I suppose you can imagine how wrong that looked.
The snickers in the dugout have turned into outright hysterics. The taunts coming from the bench are becoming so vulgar that I doubt they are appropriate for this website. Even the people in the stands are laughing. And those are parents. I would rather have had a baseball in my nuts than listen to that. I close my eyes and go to my special place to escape the mortification.
After a minute or so, my coach stops. Although it was humiliating, the aching is gone. I step back into the batters box and whiff on the next two pitches, then head towards the dugout prepared for the worst.....