The warm, salty Gulf air of Corpus Christi is beginning to cool and the long, sunny days are getting shorter. There’s no more running poles in the 100-degree August heat, and no more grinding thru a seemingly endless revolving door of inter-squad scrimmages. The Blue-Gray Fall World Series is in the books and the Gray team has bragging rights for the next year. The Ders have spent the last four months preparing for the 2015 season, and now the lights of the Dirty Chap have dimmed. Fall practice is over.
As my teammates and I now reduce our baseball workloads and turn our attention to the looming specter of final exams, you’d think there would be a sense of relief. You get a little burned out running the same drills day-after-day, working in the same lifting, conditioning, BP and bullpen groups. The Blue-Gray World Series is an awesome way to end it all, but you’re glad the grind of fall is over. I’ve felt that way in years past, but not this year… I realized that this was my last fall practice in a Ders uniform. The finality of it all set in on Monday afternoon following the Blue-Gray World Series. There would be no shagging balls in right field during batting practice while Coach Malone’s 90’s metal mix-tapes play over the PA system today. No PFP, no bunt coverages and I wouldn’t be tarping the infield in case it rained overnight. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but in some strange, masochistic way, I missed it.
Like most seniors at Texas A&M – Corpus Christi, I’m focused on my GPA, my last few classes, graduating and earning my degree. My classmates and I are transitioning from adolescence into adulthood. In a little over a semester, I’ll be a college graduate and “real, adult life” starts. Worrying about my grades, practice schedules and finding time to study will soon morph into worrying about income taxes, mortgage rates and climbing the corporate ladder. While the prospect of starting my adult life is exciting and full of possibilities, today I’d give anything to suit up and get back out in the scorching heat for one more season of August BP and one more fall filled with monotonous intersquad scrimmages. I watched the movie “The Sandlot” the other day, and much like the adult Scotty Smalls fondly reminisces on the never-ending game that he, Benny the Jet, Squints and Ham played on a vacant lot, I’ll always have great memories of fall practices on the Dirty Chap.
There are 13 seniors on this team looking at facing their final season in a Ders uniform. After the season, some of us will take the next step and play at this game at the professional level, and some of us will hang up our cleats and move on to successful careers in the business world. Regardless of what paths we take after the season, we’re all on the same path right now. God willing, that path will end up leading the Ders to Omaha.
Jacob Dorris
