Joe Cool Finance

I just made finance awesome.

Of course, the means by which I achieved this stunning feat are far from awesome, but Machiavelli would no doubt approve of my weekend antics. This past weekend was our end-of-season Capital Alumni Network Double Elimination Softball Tournament (CANDEST, for (not that) short), and I was all geared up to improve upon our 5th place finish from last year. We had dispatched of Georgia Tech in a previously played first round game, and was ready to upend the higher ranked Auburn Tigers early Saturday morning.

Ok, that didn’t go as planned.

Ending up in the losers’ bracket early on is a bit of a mixed blessing. Yes, it makes the road to an ultimate championship damn near impossible, considering you’ll have to play at least 4 more full games then the team who takes the winner’s bracket approach to the finals. On the other hand, instead of your next game always being a guaranteed tougher draw, you take a step backwards in the level competition and play a low-seeded patsy who just defeated another low-seeded patsy to stay alive. In our case, it would be the #48th ranked Gamecocks of South Carolina.

Generally speaking, most teams will play their best players throughout the tournament, with the ultimate goal of winning the whole thing. However, most teams will list “having fun” as some sort of secondary objective, and that translates into playing your bench when you can. So for four innings, I watched our team build a lead against the Spirit of Spurrier. In order to stay sharp however, I was to enter the game shortly after that as the feared “late-inning defensive replacement.”

Bad idea.

The first play was simple enough; a pop out to my right which our third baseman handled with relative ease. You know, there’s something about tournament softball. Just off the left field line is a DJ playing music the greatest hits of the 80’s (Everyone loves Journey.), there are plenty of spectators, and with the right gust of wind, you can get a whiff of the grilled food you’ll soon be enjoying once this game is over and you can relax for the day. But now is now the time to think about all this. Now is the time to get the second out of the inning.

This was the first game we had played on the main field this year, but I remember ousting Notre Dame last year during our marathon-loser’s bracket survival run. The field plays sharp, as it is well groomed. The dirt is fast, but manageable-

CRACK.

As the sharp grounder headed my way, I had a complete beat on the bright yellow orb. It would be a three-hopper as it darted in my direction. The ball hit the dirt early – probably before the pitcher’s area – and would bounce again before a final short hop into my glove. Years of AP Geometry and Physics come in handy in these sorts of situations. As the amplitude of each bounce decreases, the ball will eventually end up in a straight roll. But since it would take a distance that would place it in the outfield for that to take place, I’d have to play this off the bounce. Judging from the first two bounces, the third should hit a few feet in front of me and hit my glove about 8 inches over the sandy earth.

ROCK.

Did I say 8 inches? I meant 3 and a half feet.
Did I say glove? I meant left eye.

So here I sit in my office, crunching numbers and creating spreadsheets, whilst wearing the sunglasses I should have been wearing on the diamond. For the record, my eye is fine. It’s swollen and blacker than usual, but there’s no damage. In a week or so, we should be back to normal.

Other than the fact that I just made finance awesome.