I love a team with pluck and determination as much as the next guy but… doesn’t being talented matter at all? Not if you are Kieran Darcy of ESPN.com. Her (?) treacly feature about the Newbury College baseball team - probably the worst college baseball team in the country - is hard to read (in fact I started skimming pretty quickly. Some gems:
One after another, the Becker players continue to take turns in the batting cage—without wearing batting helmets, some without uniforms on—while the players in the field whoop it up and joke around with each other as they retrieve the hit baseballs. Newbury head coach Greg Sullivan decides to take action. He disappears into the dugout and emerges moments later with a package of golf ball-sized Wiffle balls, then a milk crate full of larger, orange and yellow hardballs.Am I supposed to admire the fact that, instead of telling the opposing coach to get his team out of the fucking cage, The Newbury coach decided to have his team play wiffle-pepper? I can understand why he wouldn’t be assertive, though - the dude is 23. That’s pretty admirable, actually, and I respect that he had the balls to take the reins of a sure-to-be-awful team in the hopes of building a program. Still…
The entire article makes the Newbury players sound like a bunch of adorable urchins with a can-do spirit and zero ability to play baseball whatsoever. They don’t lose, they lose often and by a lot. This, too, is forgivable, as they are a team made up mostly of players not good enough to play high school baseball. If I had the opportunity, I also would have played on my college baseball team, despite being horribly unqualified to do so. But do they have to sound like refugees from Gil Thorp? Whenever they go anywhere, they “sprint”; whenever they score a run (not often) they hoot and holler like they just won the World Series; when they lose, they beam like Hare Krishnas. But of all of the embarrassing things in the article, the undisputed king goes to Darcy’s closing paragraphs:
The banquet ended. The season was over. Time to party, or start focusing on next week’s finals, right?
Except, no. The Nighthawks wanted to keep playing. They wanted one more game. And they got one.
MIT agreed to play them. On Friday at 3 p.m. So these Nighthawks would be buttoning up their jerseys one more time this season. And taking batting practice, and infield/outfield. And they’d hear coach Sullivan’s chirping. And they’d cheer like crazy for Fishsticks and the rest. And they’d play like bulldogs.
Do you really need to know the final score?
You already know who won.
Congratulations on your trip to the Special Olympics, Newbury Nighthawks. You win the gold medal!