Sunday diversion / Americana + softball edition

not the train wreck that is the AL WC “race”
If members of RS Nation can step back from the ledge, even they might enjoy a trip down memory lane, to a simpler time, when a guy on a pitcher’s mound (or on 2nd Base) could beat the best softball team in town (any town) with just a 1st Baseman, one other infielder and one outfielder. And then get in his car and drive hundreds of miles to do the same thing to the best softball team in some other town.

I put aside a few weeks ago this piece from ESPN about Eddie Feigner as The King and His Court are hanging up the spikes after 65 years. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, you should read the piece, and/or go the The Official Website. It is quite a story of a long-ago America.

I am (just barely) old enough to have seen the guy, coming through our suburban town in the mid-1960s on his never-ending barnstorming tour. I only remember that I saw it, with no details in the memory banks at all. But in those days it must have been something like seeing the Harlem Globetrotters before they became total clowns, before people had ‘seen it all’ on TV, when folks had a different capacity for being surprised by people doing amazing things live, in front of them.

The disbelief, followed by the oohs and the ahhs. Before the intertubes and (especially) YouTube made everything accessible to pretty much everyone pretty much immediately.

You might have heard about things that The King could do on a softball field, but you would not believe it until you saw it with your own eyes . (Sometimes, not even then.) You knew, as a kid, who the best players in town were. Seeing them beaten by a guy pitching blindfolded from 2nd Base gave you a sense that the world was a huge place, in which there were people who do unimaginable things. Which made you try to imagine other things that might be unimaginable.

Thanks, Eddie (R.I.P, 2000) and the boys.

© Sandy Mattingly 2011