Dear Daily Princetonian: A summer of softball

Toward the end of last school year, I decided to spend my summer on campus, and by mid-May, I had settled on a research group based in the computer science department to work with. While I was quite excited for the summer to start, I struggled to come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be spending my days at home in San Diego on the beach, but instead would be holed up in a building all day 3,000 miles away from home with little reason to go outside for most of the summer. Turned out I was I wrong.

I began working on June 3, the day after Commencement. Within a few days, one of the graduate students in my group, Harlan Yu, invited me to come play softball with him. He explained that he was the captain of a department team in a school-run league. I had never played baseball growing up, and told him this. But he said it was OK, and that the team took all levels of players. I really didn’t feel too bad about playing. After all, how athletic could a bunch of computer science graduate students and professors be?

Apparently pretty athletic.

The Princeton Summer Softball League is roughly 30 years old. Its current commissioner is operations research and financial engineering professor Alain Kornhauser GS ’71, and the league runs every summer from late May to early August. Games are played at West Windsor Fields.

The “A” league has only a handful of teams and consists of teams from the larger departments, like molecular biology, politics and the Department of Facilities. The “B” league has quite a few more teams and is composed of teams from the smaller departments and organizations, such as the Office of Development, physics, the Princeton University Press and computer science.

The computer science team, known as the Cache Hitters, has an up-and-down history. Recently, however, the team has been very strong and has regularly either won or come close to winning the “B” league championship.

“We don’t take it all that seriously,” Yu said. “We’re mostly just there to have a good time and be outside during the summer.”

On June 8, I played in my first game for the Cache Hitters. Though our team gained an early lead against the Coprolites (a united squad from the geosciences and ecology and evolutionary biology departments), I went 0-2 off the bat and quickly realized I was far and away the worst player on the team. My conceptions about the athletic ability of computer scientists were apparently misconceptions. I was already a bit of an outsider as an economics major doing research with a computer science professor. And now I had become even more of an outsider as a poor softball player doing research with championship-caliber softball players. Thankfully, I reached base safely in each of my final three at-bats, with two infield singles that were awkwardly fielded by the opposing third baseman and a walk. We won 23-3, and I had proven my worth! Sort of.

As we played more games, I got to know the team better. The Cache Hitters boasted a healthy mix of players. A core of graduate students was complemented by a solid contingent of senior faculty members, staff members, friends of faculty, children of faculty and a single undergraduate, yours truly.

“Many of the players have been playing ever since they’ve been at Princeton,” Yu said. “For faculty, that often means more than 10 years. We have lots of experience.”

Nearly the entire team was solid both offensively and defensively, but there were a few players that stood out.

For example, there was computer science lecturer Kevin Wayne, who many underclassmen know as the mild-mannered professor who teaches the department’s introductory courses. Wayne had been my professor for COS 226: Algorithms and Data Structures the previous fall, and let’s just say I would never have guessed that the man who taught me about priority queues, symbol tables and radix sorts was a five-tool player.

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Wayne was a cheetah in centerfield, sprinting with the pace of a teenager to chase down fly balls and diving when he needed to. He was also an able leadoff hitter who routinely legged out infield singles, turned routine singles into doubles and turned line drives hit into the gaps into home runs.

Then there was computer science professor Larry Peterson. Fresh off his term as department chair, Peterson played with a vigor uncharacteristic of a man who also boasts a textbook — “Computer Networks: A Systems Approach” — in its fourth edition. Peterson was a savvy batter, having perfected the art of lacing pitches down the left-field line. He also provided a steady hand as a pitcher.

My adviser, computer science professor Ed Felten, proved to be a sure-handed first baseman and a strong left-handed power hitter. Batting in the cleanup spot for much the season, Felten racked up the RBIs while flashing some opposite-field power from time to time.

As for me, I lost track of my exact batting average with a few games left in the season. But I know that I finished right around .500. To be fair, I did not have a single extra-base hit, and I can count the number of pitches I lifted out of the infield on two hands. But I did do a good job of exploiting third basemen and shortstops with weak arms for infield singles. As a fielder, I alternated between catcher and rightfielder, the two positions that had the smallest impact on the game.

Things started off a little rocky with a 13-12 loss to The Damned (civil and environmental engineering) on May 20. By the time I arrived, the Cache Hitters had run off three straight victories. The 23-3 victory over the Coprolites was the fourth, and we would never look back.

But glory does not come without its challenges. On June 25, we faced a talented Olden St. Valve & Fitting (chemical engineering) team led by power-hitting outfielder and graduate student Bob Batten. Down 9-5 at one point in the game, we rallied to take an 11-9 lead. But in the bottom of the sixth, we surrendered two runs to tie the game. In the top of the seventh inning, we scored the go-ahead run on a single by assistant professor Michael Freedman. Then in the bottom of the seventh, with a 12-11 lead in hand, Olden St. Valve & Fitting loaded the bases on us before a pop out ended the game.

The Cache Hitters romped to victory repeatedly over the next few weeks before we ran into another tough team. This time, it was the Degenerate Bosons (physics), and we were pitted against them in our only doubleheader of the season. Though we won 23-10 in the first game, we were forced to use a depleted lineup in the second game because of a combination of injuries and players having other commitments. The Bosons put up a fight, but in the end we prevailed 13-12.

Our next two games were rained out, and by the next time we played it had been nearly two weeks. All the pent up energy led to an offensive explosion as we massacred Avalanche Breakdown (electrical engineering) by a score of 29-8, thus securing for ourselves the top seed in the playoffs.

The playoffs were an eight-team, double-elimination tournament. We needed four wins for a title, and we got just that, winning 19-6 over the Degenerate Bosons, 11-6 over the DNAces (molecular biology), 13-6 over Olden St. Valve & Fitting in the semifinals and 14-6 over Olden St. Valve & Fitting again in the finals.

Unfortunately, a rain delay pushed the championship game to the day of my flight home. But it really wasn’t that much of a bummer. After all, the tournament was more about having fun than winning, and I’d played in more than a dozen games over the course of the season. All it meant was that I got to enjoy the feeling of being a champion without another dropped ball in right field or another passed ball at the plate.