A Humbling Day on the Softball Field.

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On Sunday I realized something--softball and baseball are a lot harder than they look on TV. Baseball used to be what I did all summer long and I was pretty good at it for my age. I figured that I could just pick up a bat, ball, and glove and be just as good as I used to be. Not quite the case. In the process of attempting this, I learned several lessons.

• Bad habits do not go away over time just because you haven't had the opportunity to practice them. In the last 2 years of when I played baseball I started developing a really bad throwing form. It meant that I had little power and quite horrible aim, not to mention looking kind of silly. I thought I could just pick up a ball and I would throw normal again. Well I tried this and still had issues aiming the ball and my throwing speed wasn't superb.
• Baseball and softball actually take a good amount of upper body strength. After practicing for a couple hours, it seemed like every muscle in the upper half of my body was sore. Yeah, I have no upper body strength now.
• Holes in the batters box suck. They sucked back in the day and they still suck. I almost want to bat switch so I don't have to stand in the holes.
• Turns out, I'm actually halfway decent at pitching for slow-pitch softball.
• Fielding ground balls is no where near as easy as the pros make it look. It's hard to keep track of the ball as it bounces back and forth and it's just unnatural to bend down like that to pick it up. I think infield hits happen a lot more in slow-pitch softball than in pro baseball.
• Softball fields are ridiculously small. It takes like 2 seconds to get from one base to the next. Pitching is quite dangerous with how close the pitcher stands to the batter.
• My hitting style is no different from what it was 8 years ago. I was always a lead-off or number 2 hitter and that's pretty much the same way I bat and run today.
• Baseball and softball are still amazingly fun.