Living Out Childhood Dreams

As much as baseball has been a huge part of my childhood, as an adult a new form of baseball has taken over in my life. Slow pitch softball has been on a huge rise as of lately. Slow pitch softball in which men and women can live out there childhood dreams without having to be in top athletic shape. It is a sport in which drinking is encourage but definitely is accepted. For someone like me that used to play a lot of baseball growing up but no longer am in the best of shape can still go out and play a similar sport and stay competitive in a team environment. In order for someone like me to still play baseball I would have to practice daily to stay in the right baseball shape to stay competitive, but in softball you can go out with friends after a night of drinking and just have fun on any given day. The rules are changed so someone as out of shape as me can still be competitive. The biggest rule differences between baseball and softball are that the bases are 60 feet instead of the 90 foot bases in baseball, the pitches are thrown under hand and lobbed to you instead of being thrown over hand and the balls are 3 times the size of a baseball.

While this seams to be a fat mans game it still gets very competitive. In my league I play with ex semi pro and college baseball players that are had made it as far as they could playing baseball but were not done playing the game. There are even famous ex professional baseball players that once played in the Bay Area that now play on the same fields I play on every weekend. It is not uncommon for me to see players like Jose Canseco and Eric Byrnes playing the game before me on a field that looks just like the Oakland A’s field they play on today.  

While most little boys growing up playing baseball I dream of one day playing for my favorite Major League Baseball team (The Oakland Athletics) and playing in the World Series. Obviously these never happened for me, but while playing softball I can still live out these dreams ever weekend. There are tournaments all over northern California every weekend and many different leagues going on all over the Bay Area every night. It has become such a major part of the community I live in that last season Concord’s Summer League had 250 teams filled with ten to fifteen players per team like myself trying to live out there childhood dreams. There have even been ball parks created all over the country called the Big League Field of Dream. All of the fields at the Big League Field of Dreams have been created to look like exact replicas of ball professional ball parks all over the world. This way a fat out of shape man can truly live out his childhood dreams of one day living playing on there favorite professional stadium. There was even a Softball World Series held once a year in Las Vegas in which the best teams in the country go to compete to be the best in the world.