Baseball: "Before"

Tonight is a special day in the Furr household.

Carole will be singing the national anthem at tonight’s Vermont Lake Monsters minor league baseball game, which is cool, and … I’ll be throwing out the first pitch, which isn’t actually all that cool. Or exciting. Or noteworthy.

The Lake Monsters play in the short-season A (low-level, the rung just above the rookie leagues) New York-Penn League. They’ve been averaging 2,251 fans per game this season, but that includes both the weekend games where they have fireworks and 25 cent hot dogs and free t-shirts for the first thousand fans AND the games where the skies threaten rain all day, and the free giveaway is a collapsible dog bowl with the Lake Monsters logo, and it’s Monday.

Today is Monday, and the free giveaway is a collapsible dog bowl with the Lake Monsters logo, and rain is in the forecast. I’m going to be surprised if they get much more than a thousand fans in the stands.

And that’s exactly what Carole wanted when she was asked (after submitting a video of herself singing the anthem at a Burlington Concert Band concert, and having been accepted into the Lake Monsters’ anthem-singers pool) what night she wanted to sing. She figured it’d be easier to sing at a low-attendance, low-expectations game than it would be to sing at a packed house.

That said, I think she’s going to be great. She’s been practicing quite a bit and she’s been in very good voice. Other than nerves and technical issues with the microphone (which we hope will be nonexistent), there’s no reason why she shouldn’t do an amazing job.

As for me — the imbecile throwing out the first pitch — well, that’s likely to be another story entirely. No one really pays any attention to whoever throws out the first pitch at a minor league baseball game unless it’s a bona-fide celebrity (local or otherwise) or if whoever has the honor has brought a lot of friends and family along. Most people don’t even register that there is a first pitch being thrown out; it’s all done in a very low-key fashion. The fans are too busy finding their seats, eating hot dogs, peering confusedly at their souvenir dog bowls, and so forth. It’s not until they call for the fans to rise for the anthem that anything happening on the field really registers on their radar to any great extent.

Of course, you do see YouTube videos of great “first pitch” fails at major league games — like the poor woman who plunked a cameraman standing along the first base line. You screw up colorfully enough, you’re going to get some notoriety. But again, we’re talking major league there. There are a lot more eyeballs and television cameras, to say nothing of smartphone videos, involved. If I screw up horribly tonight, it will be little noted nor long remembered (™ A. Lincoln 1863). But that said, for the person throwing the ball, it’s a low-reward high-risk experience. You’re so terrified of being one of the great all-time fails that you think too much and boom, you plunk a Little Leaguer who’s on the field for the national anthem festivities. It’s not really something I’ve ever really stayed up nights wanting to do.

So, with that said, you’re probably wondering how I came to be in this fix in the first place.

Well, so I am I.

I mean, I know technically how I got the honor — I won a charity auction a few months ago for the right to throw out the first pitch at a Lake Monsters game.

The auction was one of those grab-bag online auctions where everything from ski passes at the local ski resort to gift certificates for local restaurants are up for bid. There are always some hotly desired items (a golf outing for four at the local PGA-level course) and some clunkers (have your fortune told by local Tarot card expert So-and-so). I find charity auctions kind of interesting for a couple of reasons — one, it’s amusing to see what sort of things the charity was able to get donated (tarot card readings? really?) and once in a while there actually is something desirable and worth bidding on. And if nothing else, there’s the urge to get in a moderately low bid early for something peculiar or strange and see if against all logic and reason it holds on and winds up as the winning bid.

This year’s auction on behalf of the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts (our main local theater and performing arts space) had 220 items up for auction — some interesting, some not. I won the bidding for two items (but put in bids on four or five more, none of which I was especially heartbroken to lose out on):

• A tablecloth-and-napkin set from April Cornell


• The right to throw out the first pitch at a Vermont Lake Monsters game

I have absolutely no idea why I bid more than a few dollars on the whole first pitch thing. I can see bidding fifty bucks early on just for giggles with the expectation of being outbid in due course, and if I’d won at a bid of $50, well, why not? But $185? (Yes, $185. I’m embarrassed just typing it. That’s real money.) I do not remember bidding that much and can only say that either I made a typo (and then overlooked the typo when the site asked me to confirm my bid) or I was just out of my damn mind late one night and was up web-surfing when I should have been sleeping. You know those late-night (or drunk) Amazon purchases you hear about? You’re insomniac and cranky (or drunk) and five days later a Christmas-edition Big Mouth Billy Bass shows up at your door? Well, I think “bidding $185 to make a total fool out of yourself in front of a thousand strangers” certainly falls into the same general area.

Did I mention that the package also included a free baseball cap and Lake Monsters mascot bobblehead?

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The cap turned out to be a leftover giveaway cap from last year’s Northeast Delta Dental cap night (although it is a nice cap; I’ve been wearing it on all my walks this summer) and the bobblehead definitely fills the “souvenir mascot bobblehead” niche in my life list, the one I didn’t know needed filling.

Have I been practicing? I meant to, but travel for work and other things cut into my free time and I didn’t get around to it — and then suddenly here we were, with only a couple days to go. I took a dozen baseballs to a local high school field yesterday and set up on the mound and aimed in the general direction of home plate. A third of my throws would have been right on the money. Another third or so would have required the catcher to step a couple steps to the left or right to make the catch. The others? Well, they weren’t as good. No cameramen would have been killed in the process, but they wouldn’t have had major league scouts calling up to sign me.

From what I understand, the most common mistake by first-pitch-throwers is shorting it; the advice generally given is to aim for three or four feet behind home plate, and hope it comes out in the wash. (I’ve never had a really strong throwing arm, so it probably doesn’t matter what I try to do; it’ll work out or not and all the planning and preparation I can do will probably not affect things in the slightest.)

Anyway, I expect to have some footage to share here later or tomorrow, both of Carole doing a tremendous job on the national anthem and me … doing whatever it is I wind up doing. I can say for sure that right now the words going through my mind are right out of Shepard’s Prayer (q.v.).

 

Weight Loss Update

Against all logic and reason, my weight loss plan is going well. From a high of 258 pounds in February, I’m down to 209.4 as of Saturday.

I know that people lie about their diets all the time, but my scale is WiFi/Internet-integrated and the numbers don’t lie. It’s knowing that the scale will rat me out digitally for all to see that helps keep me honest. (I’ve got my IFTTT account set up to automatically tweet/share my weigh-ins, WeightGurus.com syncs to Fitbit, Fitbit updates my weight, IFTTT tweets it. Isn’t technology wonderful?)

I’m pleased by my progress, but at the same time I feel awkward about what may come across like bragging — as though that nice even line of descent from 255 to 230 to 209 was easy.

It wasn’t.

Okay, some of the weight loss seemed to happen just by itself. I attribute that to stopping my carvedilol and losartan, both of which were prescribed to help with high blood pressure and neither of which was making any dent at all (I never could get my systolic blood pressure below 150 consistently while on those two drugs) and both of which have a known side effect of causing water retention. Since stopping, my blood pressure didn’t get worse, but I lost a lot of weight very quickly, dropping from 255 to the upper 230s almost overnight.

But the rest is the result of some seriously anal calorie counting using the MyFitnessPal app and doing a ton of walking. Case in point: I walked nine miles a day Monday through Thursday of last week and then close to eleven on Saturday. That kind of activity adds up. I’m walking to burn calories and I’m walking to build muscle. I eat a lot of high-protein/low-fat/low-sugar foods, too. So far, it all seems to be working.

But I’m borderline ‘hungry’ a lot of the time — the result of a body trained to expect food every time a little hunger surfaced, just like a cat who expects to be tossed cat treats on demand. Rest assured, I’m getting enough nutrition; being hungry doesn’t mean I’m on a starvation diet. Learning to ignore hunger, or at least to not give in to it, is the hardest part of dieting. Well, that and the “oh, what would one _____ hurt?” All the little lies we tell ourselves, you know?

I did all this once before, back in 2009-2010, and got down to 180 pounds. Then I put it all back on, and then some, in the intervening years. I blame depression and stress and a lot of lies-to-self. I hope this time I can keep it off. The only semi-guaranteed way to do anything about high blood pressure is to lose weight. Once I’m down at my target weight, we’ll see where my BP winds up — and then we can make a sensible decision regarding medication.