Scott
Cody
July
1, 1997
With bats as their brushes and balls as their paint, the National Endowment for the Arts softball team smeared our Ballpark Estimates over the canvass of the National Mall last night. The final score was 33 to 13 in favor of NEA. With a veritable symphony of big hitters, NEA danced away with the game from the first inning.
The game had the paradoxes of an Escher drawing: short of players, we had NEA pitch for our team and they made some of our best plays.
The Ballpark Estimates thought we were sculpting a pretty good game in the top of the first, making three good hits and scoring one run. However, in the bottom of the first, with our pitcher throwing sopranos (high pitches), NEA scored runs for more than an octet of players. They were almost poetry in motion. This first inning set the pace for the next three innings: NEA was on their toes and scoring runs at an allegro pace.
At the bottom of the third, we all paused to listen to the fat lady warm up her voice.
The Ballpark Estimates improved our performance in the fourth inning, and in the fifth, we showed our true colors. Dan Kearney, Deo Bencio and Mike Stavrianos, nimble as ballerinas, hit back-to-back-to-back home runs to lead off the inning. In that same inning, Dan hit his home run number two, too. Melissa Schettini hit an artful triple that could have easel-ly been a home run, however, the third base coach (me) put up the stop cymbal.
Unlike Beethoven, we never got to our ninth; the game ended after six innings. But the loss did not give the team the blues. In fact, by scoring thirteen runs, we baroque our previous record, which is encouraging. The key to this game is that we had fun and we played in harmony.
We have two weeks off before our next performance against RAND on Monday, July 14.
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