Bits & Pieces

Softball Has Been Barry, Barry

Good To Her

By Kim J. Harmon

All she wanted to do was hit.

Not walk.

If there is one thing that is more than evident early in the 2007 season, it’s that the Newtown High School softball team can hit. And third baseman Joanna Barry has been hitting the ball just as hard – if not harder – than anyone else on the team.

She had seven hits in her first eight trips to the plate with a triple and two home runs, for goodness sake.

Last week against New Milford, Barry stepped to the plate against a pitcher – Vanessa Maloney – who has some nice pop on her toss, but was kind of all over the place. On one particular pitch, Maloney released much too early and the ball struck the dirt about six feet from the plate and then bounced up to hit Barry in the leg.

A hit batsman.

A free base.

Barry paused, though, and looked back to the umpire with hope in her eyes that he wouldn’t send her to first.

But he pointed down that way.

“Oh … really?” she sighed before dropping her bat and trudging off up the line.

There are lots of players who don’t mind walking and those who go up to the plate looking for a walk. Barry just wanted to hit. You got to respect that.

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More than three weeks into spring and the Newtown High School baseball team has a trip to Cooperstown, New York, called off because of snow.

Yeah – snow. Where are we living? Iceland?

Newtown was due to leave with Pomperaug last Saturday, but overnight on Thursday a storm rolled through upstate New York and dumped about an inch of snow with more expected on Friday and Saturday.

Let me check my calendar … it is spring, isn’t it?

Reminds me of the first time I took my son to Cooperstown – six years ago, I think. The weather down here was okay, a little cold, but up past Torrington on Route 8 things were getting a little slick. Once we crossed over into New York, we saw some snow but only patches on the rolling fields alongside the highway.

But once we got off the main highway, just a few miles from the turnoff to Cooperstown, we were greeted with mountains of snow. The fellow at the convenience store told us a heavy snow had just barreled through and dropped a foot of powder.

The snow was piled so high on the median, we couldn’t see the oncoming traffic. Things were plowed well, but – gosh – it got me to wondering (then and now) how Cooperstown High School ever gets to play baseball in April.

Oh, it will get warm sometime. I mean, I saw the sun for about two minutes on Monday afternoon. So, it’s still out there somewhere.

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Even in the midst of a hotly contested girls’ lacrosse game, there was time for a little civility.

I was standing behind the visitor’s cage and Newtown and Glastonbury were tied, 8-8, with a few minutes left to play. As one of the referees reset the players after a whistle, I was beset by a couple of loud sneezes.

A Glastonbury defender turns her head and said, “Bless you.”

A moment later, play re-started.

But see, there is always time for civility.

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I think the most sobering realization that struck me when my daughter turned 17 on Monday is not that he has become a young woman or that she has just one more year of high school before she heads off to college but that she can walk into any R or NC-17 rated movie she wants to and the people selling the tickets can’t say anything about it.

She can go see Grindhouse or 300 or The Hills Have Eyes 2 or Hostel, which was so unsettling I had to turn my eyes away from the screen three times … and I grew up on horror movies. Oh sure, we can have quote-unquote rules, but we were all teenagers once, right?

I mean, Dawn of the Dead came out in 1978 and was rated X (the modern NC-17) and I, just 16 at the time, got in with a fake i.d.