Charlotte Magazine – July 2019

104 CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JUNE 2019

I

“IN!” THE SHORTSTOP YELLED.

“In!” the le elder followed.

“Yes,” I wanted to say, “I know!”

I did know. But as the only journalist on a soball

team of construction workers, I must’ve given oˆ the

stench of someone who needed assistance. I’d devoted

a good portion of my rst 21 years to organized

baseball, but hey, I get it: A few years ago, a farmer

asked me of my chosen profession, “So you just sit

around and type all day?” When that precedes you,

good luck getting anyone in the concrete business to

give you the benet of the doubt on a ”y ball.

It’d been a heavy few months leading up to that

moment. My father’s death was the big one, but I

also followed concerns in Charlotte that ranged from

the rising murder rate to election fraud to immigrant

neighbors being deported to a police shooting. One

thing I love about this town is that it oˆers plenty of

ways to get involved and get serious. I’ve spent the

past six years forming relationships with everyone

from chefs to activists, journalists to politicians. Some

work with kids who’ve been convicted of crimes,

others with adults who need a home. Add in regular

drops of social media, and the daily conversations that

surround me are mostly meaningful.

We can’t be that way all the time. So when my

brother, Kenny, invited me to ll out the roster on his

company soball team this spring, I spent the $30 at

SportsLink and signed up for at least one break a week.

Kenny’s a project manager who leads crews that

pour the framework for many of the tall buildings you

see around town. His co-workers understand things

I’ll never grasp, and their jobs are stressful in ways

I’ll never understand. They’re not on social media

or wondering what to wear for the next restaurant

opening. When you work from sunup to sundown in

a city that’s sprouting new buildings every week, you

don’t have a lot of time to be concerned with hashtags.

Apparently, they don’t have time to worry about

soball, either. Our team, Just Pour It, started the

year with exactly one bat. We bought a second in

week three.

ALONG THE WAY

I wish I could say the same for

our opponents, who showed up in

uniforms and carried full bags of gear.

Just Pour It lost by double digits on

opening night, and it stayed like that

throughout the season. We took a

beating every Wednesday, sometimes

twice a night, and turned teams

sponsored by Thomas Street Tavern

and Smokey Joe’s Café into the

Yankees and Red Sox.

“You should write a story about us,” our pitcher, Tom, told me

during a break between a doubleheader in which we lost by a

combined 26 runs. That’s another thing people say to journalists a lot,

usually as a joke—only this time the joke’s on Tom, who now has his

name in a magazine as the pitcher who gave up all those runs.

The last time I participated in a rec league was 2008, when I lived

in Winston-Salem. Before that, my newspaper’s team in Fayetteville.

Leagues in those cities weren’t nearly as competitive as this one. I saw

a diˆerent side of Charlotte’s evening meetup culture this spring, one

away from the breweries, networking, and community conversations.

It’s a soball culture, and some folks take it as seriously as Foundation

For the Carolinas does raising money.

Our team had decent players, a few of whom played in college, but

we rarely kept a game closer than 10 runs. Just Pour It nished the year

with a record of 0-8, with a run diˆerential of minus-88.

Damn, it was fun.

What was good for our opponents’ win-loss records, and good for

Kenny’s company’s team-building, was good for this writer’s mental

balance.

I’ll turn 40 this winter, and all around us are reminders that seasons

pass in a blink. It’s hard to believe that the DNC was seven years ago,

or that the mayor’s arrest was ve years ago, or that HB2 was three

years ago. Each spring, I’d think about joining a soball team like I

had in those other cities, but I never thought I had the time, and time

rolled on anyway.

As I stood in le-center eld watching the ball pop up into the night

sky at a park on Beatties Ford Road that evening in March, it hardly

seemed possible that a decade had passed since I last chased down a

”y ball, back when this game seemed like a priority.

It was too deep for the shortstop but well within my range. “Can

of corn,” my father would’ve said. I still don’t understand how that

means, “Easy catch.”

The shortstop was more urgent with his “In!” The le-elder, too.

Their voices caused me to go from a glide to a sprint, and I hit a

small dip in the grass, or at least I hope it was a dip, because I lost my

balance. Ten years ago, I’d have kept running. But that night, carrying

a few extra pounds and years, I stumbled and fell. The ball plopped in

the grass a few feet in front of me.

My rst reaction was anger, thinking I’d let our team down. But aer

I tossed the ball back in, all I heard was the sound of my Just Pour It

teammates laughing at me.

I’d missed that.

The Lovable

Losers of

Just Pour It

The best of times with the worst

softball team in Charlotte

BY MICHAEL GRAFF

LOGAN CYRUS