SOFTBALL GIRLS RACE AGAINST TIME, SUNSHINE

By TERRY MCDERMOTT April 15, 1997

THE SEATTLE TIMES

Somewhere, the sun is shining.

Oh my goodness, it’s here.

In Seattle in April. It’s midmorning on a bright blue Saturday, warmed by a lush promise of early spring – false, I know, but it’s nice to be lied to every once in a while. Honesty is a highly overrated virtue.

The sun lures good feeling out of the most curmudgeonly among us. You can almost hear Ernie Banks whisper: Let’s play two. Or three, or four, or whatever we can before we lose the light. Beside the lawn outside the Queen Anne Community Center, the clack of plastic cleats on concrete is joined by the click of a portrait shutter.

It’s Little League picture day. The Tully’s Major League Girls Fastpitch Softball team, pinstriped in the coolest uniforms in the whole league, poses, all scrunched-up faces, grins, and long hair shooting out the backs of black caps.

A shortstop-sized mite for the next team in line takes one look at Tully’s and concludes: “It’s no fair. They have girl coaches.”

Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, they do. Four women, led by Sobie Foody, 20 years ago the first girl player in the history of Bellevue Baseball Little League, command the 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds.

When the pictures are taken and the last of the pancake breakfasts have disappeared, when warm-ups and the Mariner Moose are both finished for the day, Tully’s takes the field on Diamond No. 3 against The Homing Instinct, a hilltop gifts store.

“Kick some booty, girlies,” Sobie tells the Tullies.

Everybody smiles conspiratorially at everybody else. You can see wheels churning inside. They come to a stop at the conclusion that this is way better than taking daughters to work. This is the first year in its history that the Queen Anne Little League has sanctioned girls softball.

Control, it is immediately apparent, is going to be a precious commodity on the mound among the softballers this season. The Homers are patient at the plate. They take their walks and add up runs.

The Coffee Kids are free-swingers. Maybe it’s the caffeine. They come back, eventually surpassing the Homers.

In the top of the third, the Homers threaten. With runners at the corners, a towering pop fly (OK, it’s a short tower) is lifted toward third. Rookie third basewoman Cary McDermott gets a poor jump on the ball, but recovers and swoops in for the catch.

She bunny-hops to the bag to double the runner there, whips the ball to Clare Valentine, who relays it to Eva Strickland at first. Then a puzzle of silence descends on Diamond No. 3.

You can hear birds chirp. Heck, you can hear worms dig. The truth dawns slowly: A triple play.

In the first game on the first day of the first Queen Anne Little League Girl’s Fastpitch Softball game in history, an honest to goodness, no joke, legitimate triple play. I had seen two in my life. This is the third.

The relationship of work to play, Bart Giamatti once wrote, is a progression from that which is necessary to that which is desirable. Play is a wild goose chase with perfection at its end, he said.

This is perfect. Fifty years ago today, Jackie Robinson took the field for the first time in the uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He grounded to short in his first at bat, flew to left in his second and in his third hit into a rally-killing double play. He bunted his fourth time up and ended up on second after a wild throw.

All in all, an inauspicious beginning. A million words have been published this week to celebrate Robinson, a million more to analyze what has or has not happened since.

It’s a complicated subject, one that doesn’t easily yield its many meanings. But Saturday, see, in this girls softball game, there was this triple play. It was not complicated. It was a thing of great, simple and surprising beauty.

Cool uniforms, cool coaches and a triple play, too? Thanks, Jackie. Wish you were here.