Why I Like Baseball

October 16, 2003
9:10 am Arizona time (Pacific)

Just got back from breakfast with my roomie, Theresa MacGregor. We’re here at the Amerisuites by the Tucson airport, along with a couple dozen other women baseball players. If you’re just tuning in, we’re here as part of a fundraiser/awareness-raiser called “24 Hours for Africa.” It’s like the AIDS Ride or the Breast Cancer marathon–each participant has to raise a certain amount of money in order to participate. In this case our “marathon” is a 24 hour baseball game played by women players from all around the USA, plus we have some players from Japan and Australia.

The whole thing was the brainchild of Rob Novotny, the vice president of American Women’s Baseball. Rob has been touring the country for the past six months, recruiting players, drumming up sponsorship, arranging details, so that the event will happen. He’s been living off his credit cards all this time, but he believes in the cause, which is to save lives in Africa. US Doctors for Africa is on a mission to provide adequate drugs therapy and training for medical personnal so that mothers with HIV can go through childbirth without passing the virus on to their infant.

Steven Seagal is our honorary spokesperson. The whole thing is being broadcast live from the Apple Computer web site (http://ali.apple.com/24hours/). The game records are going to be archived in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. It’s a pretty big deal.

But the action doesn’t start for a couple of days. First we have two days of pro baseball camp, hosted by Live The Dream. I arrived last night just in time to see the Cubs go down in flames on hotel TV. Ah, heavy sigh. Wait til next year.

The Amerisuites is pretty nice. Each room is small, but clean, two double beds plus a couch, fridge, microwave, coffee maker. They’ve stocked each room for us with water, juice, veggies, lunch meat, and some other stuff. We have all the frozen chimichangas and chicken nuggets we want.

Theresa is from Colorado and is two years older than me. She played on the US national team that went to the Women’s World Series in Australia this year. We conked out last night at 11pm Arizona time (which would be 2 am for me, but it just didn’t feel very late…) and woke up this morning around 7:30. I slept okay but a little fitfully–I kept having dreams about being here and also about the Yankees. (Typical dream logic: I’m wandering the halls of the hotel trying to find the chimichangas and Alfonso Soriano is with me, and we’re sure that if we can find the chimichangas he’ll get out of his slump.) I’m excited and hyper about being here, obviously. I feel sleepy now, which means that although I slept all night, I didn’t really sleep well. I also somehow slept on top of my sore arm. Not good. Tonight I think I will sleep on the couch to keep me from rolling over on it.

The arm, for those of you who don’t know me intimately, has been sore for about two or three weeks. The injury goes back to about six years ago, I pulled a tendon in my throwing arm/elbow that developed into tennis elbow. I went to physical therapy for it and it was fine for a few years. I wasn’t trying to play baseball then so the only issue was with typing and computer use. I rehabbed, though and was fine.

Then almost two years ago I tore the tendon pulling my suitcase through an airport. It got stuck in a doorway or something and I yanked on it to get it loose. The next day my arm swelled up, but I thought at the time it was just a recurrence of the tennis elbow. About eight months after that I finally went to see a doctor about it, and they told me I had a mass of scar tissue and needed PT and ultrasound therapy. So I went to about two months of PT and ultrasound last winter, got a Theraband to do exercises, and they let me loose to do the exercises on my own.

Since I had to do these arm exercises every day anyway, I decided it was time to get some other parts of my in shape, especially my chronically bad knees and back. Why? I wanted to play baseball somewhere this summer. At the time I didn’t even know where. So I added 50 leg lifts a day with 5 pound ankle weights to the routine, along with 200 sit ups.

The rehab worked. I played this past season with the Pawtucket Slaterettes and didn’t injure my arm, knees, or back the whole summer. Then our season ended and I slacked off a little. Still, the arm has been pretty much no trouble all summer as long as I keep stretching it.

But then the American League Division Series happened and I went to Yankee Stadium for Game Two. corwin and I screamed ourselves silly, and clapped and sang and all that. And the next day my arm was killing me.

I think it was from all the clapping. I had forgotten that clapping was one of the things that aggravates the tendon–and it had been so trouble-free that I forgot that it probably is still never going to be the same.

So I’ve been taking ibuprofen four times a day ever since then, to keep the swelling and discomfort down, but it doesn’t eliminate it entirely. I ought to not be typing, but I can’t help it.

Military jets keep flying over our hotel. The windows rattle and it sounds just like an Air Force tv commercial, but louder. I wonder how that works, what with the commercial airport being right here, too?

Not much else to report at this time. We had fun playing with the waffle makers this morning, though the carb-heavy breakfast may be part of what is making me feel so tired now. I’ve been eating low carb for about ten days now and I feel great. I’m not hungry all the time and I’ve lost three pounds. So having a waffle for breakfast was a huge shock to my system. I had a hard boiled egg and some yogurt, too, but Theresa and I both stocked up some peanut butter packets for later.

We’ve got a meeting at 11:30 and then pro-camp starts at one o’clock. It runs until 5, which is when the game in New York starts. (Arizona doesn’t do daylight savings time, so we’re currently three hours, not two, behind East Coast time…) “The game.” I mean the seventh game of the American League Championship Series, which is necesssary because the Red Sox surged yesterday. I was flying all day and the pilots kept updating us on the score. I even watched the (bad) turning point of the game from an airport bar. Argh. (See previous entry.) Theresa and I are planning to gather people in the hotel lobby to watch the game. More later.