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The Geezers Of Summer

by Greg Dobbs

All who love baseball had high hopes for our teams back in springtime when the season started. If you went around the country asking fans, you'd have found 30 teams destined for the World Series.

That was then, this is now. Where teams haven't lived up to their expectations (however unrealistic they may have been!), a lot of fair-weather fans are starting to find baseball foul. Well, I've got an alternative: geezerball. You don't have to love baseball to love geezerball. You don't even have to know what geezerball is. I didn't, at least not for a while, and I was playing it!

So what is geezerball? The short explanation is, geezerball is baseball for geezers. Officially, it's known as softball for "older adults," and there's an "older adults" league in which we play all over metro-Denver; there are similar leagues all across America. But when I told my lovely wife the special rules of softball for "older adults," she lovingly named it "geezerball" and in our house anyway, the name stuck.

Special rules? Actually, they'd make sense for softball players at any age. Like overrunning a base. In real baseball, a batter can overrun first base to beat the ball, but must have a foot on the bag when he stops at second or third or he can be tagged out. Not in geezerball! Thanks to the belief that when "older adults" pull up short they can pull a muscle, we can overrun every base on the diamond!

Likewise, as base runners, we have our very own home plate. Oh sure, we bat from the familiar home plate in the corner of the baseball diamond, just like everyone else, but if we're heading home from third base (it happens a lot in geezerball, as the 26-3 score in one of my recent games will attest), we run to a duplicate home plate, the same distance from third base but actually eight feet to the right of the original.  Do "older adults," one a runner trying to score, one a catcher trying to stop him, need to collide? Does anyone??? Of course not!

My favorite rule in geezerball is the "Courtesy Runner Rule." All this means is, hey, lots of "older adults" can hit and catch and even throw the ball as well as they could half-a-life ago, but funny things have happened to their legs; they just can't run like they used to. So if you make it to first base -- and no one can help you do that -- you can simply say to the umpire, "Courtesy runner, please," and another geezer from the team can run your route on the base paths, yet come time to take the field, unlike real baseball, you're not out of the game. You're not lame, either.

Lest this makes you visualize baseball in slow motion -- very slow motion -- don't. We've got infielders on my team who are shades of Ozzie Smith.  And, "Say Hey," we've got outfielders who conjure up visions of Willie Mays making his unmatchable basket catch.

I'm not one of them. Having broken everything breakable in my face running into a line drive during a Little League game decades ago, I'm still overcoming my fear of a ball falling frighteningly fast toward me, so I'm sometimes relegated to right field, where fewer balls go than anywhere else. Are my feelings hurt? Well, better my feelings than my face! But more important, I take comfort in the fact that when I watch my major league team, The Colorado Rockies leave the dugout, the man who heads to right field is merely a National League MVP and Batting Champ, a 12-And-A-Half Million-Dollar-A-Year-Man for the Rockies who the stadium announcer calls Larrrrrrrrrry Walker. If right field's good enough for Larrrrrrrrrry, it's good enough for me.

The funny thing about geezerball is, there aren't any geezers! If you look up the definition in the dictionary, you'll find derogatory kinds of words like "odd," "queer," or "eccentric" to describe older men who are geezers. But that's not true in geezerball at all.

To the contrary, in a league where the minimum age is 50, but there's no maximum, the older "older adults" are some of the best players on the team. Why, our oldest player is 75, old enough to be my father! Imagine what you'll be doing when you're 75 (or what you're doing now!). Shagging fast grounders at second base? Legging out an infield hit to land safely at first? Riiiiiight.

Uh-uh, no real geezers on my team, or in my league. No, these particular "older adults" can still perform like the Boys of Summer (and like the Girls of Summer; a handful of them play, too). So fine, call us geezers if you like, but we're the Geezers of Summer. Life for many geezers is pretty slow, but for the Geezers of Summer, it's a grand slam ... perhaps with a Courtesy Runner rounding the bases for you.



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