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Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Baseball weekend

Current Mood:

It was the strangest thing Saturday morning: I woke up and looked out the bedroom window, saw the lovely day and said to myself, "I want to play baseball." I was in the mood to do something sportsy outdoors :-). And I didn't want something that was passive like biking or walking. I wanted action.

That mood lasted even up to the next day, which was Steve's day off. We looked up batting cages in Memphis and found a few near where we live. We knew that it being Easter, a lot of the commercial batting cages were probably closed, so we drove around Germantown looking for a park that had a batting cage that we could use just in case.

We drove along Farmington and came across Cameron-Brown Park.

It just blows me away that the U.S. builds parks like these for public use, that it's FREE. And it's CLEAN. It's 55 acres and has:
Anything remotely like this in Manila you'd have to pay membership fees for. And because it was Easter, the park wasn't full of people, but there WERE families that were there just enjoying the day. Fathers were barbecuing on the grills by the lake, children were squealing in delight as they frolicked on the playground, teenagers were jogging along the path--it was absolutely lovely.

We drove once around the park, then drove off to see if the nearest commercial batting cage was open. It wasn't. So Steve said we'd go to Walmart and buy our own baseball gear. We got an aluminum bat (I wanted the pink one but he wouldn't hear of it so we got the orange one instead :-)), a bag of baseballs, and a tee (it's kind of like a golf tee only much bigger for playing baseball). After we got our equipment we drove back to Cameron-Brown Park.

We went to the batting cage and Steve set up the tee for me to use. I haven't held a baseball bat since high school and knew I was out of practice.

It was embarrassing just how out of practice I was :-). At one point I asked Steve, "How's my form?" His reply was, "You don't want to know. Right now I just want you to concentrate on hitting the ball."

He and I took turns hitting the ball off the tee then Steve asked me if I wanted to try hitting a moving target. I said yes, so he took his position behind the pitching screen and started throwing me underhanded pitches.

That was MUCH more fun :-). And strangely enough, it hurt less than hitting the ball off the tee. I learned how it feels and sounds when the ball hits the bat just right and it whizzes into the air. Steve told me the sound coming off of a wooden bat was cooler, but I liked the "Tink!" sound the aluminum bat makes too :-).

We took turns doing that for about an hour and half, then we packed up and went home. It was a great way to spend a Sunday. I'm looking forward to us doing that more often :-). Next time we're packing a picnic lunch :-).


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