The Mercy Rule
Growing up and playing sports: two rites of passage that go hand-in-hand.
Web Watch played the usual assortment of team sports when we were younger: tee-ball, soccer, basketball. As we grew older, we tried kickball, dodgeball, tennis, and golf. Adult co-ed softball with coworkers, while entertaining, just turned into another reason to go drinking afterwards.
The outcome was always the same: we really weren’t that good at any of the sports we played. As we were often fond of saying, “what we lacked in skill, we made up for with enthusiasm.” Remember – just because someone owns their own softball glove doesn’t mean that they are good at playing softball.
There was one softball league that Web Watch was a part of that required the teams to play each other twice during the season. One team we played so over-dominated us during our first match (we recall that it was probably something like 15-0 after the first inning), but that didn’t bother us – the game was only an hour long, and we knew that there was pizza and beer waiting for us down the street, just like any other week. With the game being just an hour long, there was no mercy rule in play (actually, there might have been, but the umpires never really enforced it).
No, what bothered us was the other team’s attitude.
It’s one thing for us to mock and make fun of our own players’ abilities (or lack thereof). We already know we’re not going to win many games, if any. It’s another thing for the opposing team to jeer our gameplay openly.
