Paris Predator Softball Season Opens at Pete Lavoie Diamonds

It has been at least 25 years since I watched a softball game down at Lions Park and I was amazed at the changes there. Coaching a boy's house league and a travel team, I had the opportunity to learn more about softball as frankly, I was a baseball snob from the then borough of East York in Toronto, which produced American college and professional ball players and went to Blue Jays games and sat in the $2 grandstand seats. Yes, I am calendar old.

While watching the U15 Predators play ball, I noticed that player safety was a priority, where pitchers wore a facemask, a great idea and all dugouts had doors that caged the players and coaches. I’m not sure if having doors to the dugout is a great idea, as players and coaches can’t poke their heads out of the dugout to yell a word of encouragement, strategy, or something funny to break the tension of a situation Despite all that, I did enjoy watching the players trying their best, watching family urging the kids on, the volunteer coaches who heroically volunteered their time and the people who worked the snack bar in a building made of brick and

Mason Munro delivers a pitch during a U15 Paris Predators home game at Lion’s Park on May 21st. Paris Youth Softball Teams have officially opened their season. Stay tuned next week for game highlights.

Photo by George Le Gresley

mortar, as opposed to the old one made of wood, located behind home plate and available to be vandalized.

I’m not sure if the Predators won or lost their game against the Otterville/Norwich Otters and really, I didn’t care. The most important thing to me was how much I loved watching a game, the players that play it, and some of the heroic fielding and clutch hitting that were made. I remembered a line from the novel Shoeless Joe, a novel by W.P. Kinsella (he’s Canadian eh!), or the book that the movie “Field of Dreams” was based on, that I will always remember Roughly quoted ‘is that every place in the world is in fair territory because a foul line has no limit in length or height’. Only a writer from Saskatchewan could write that! That’s the beauty of baseball/softball, everybody is in fair territory, where rules are in the book, where players are all equal, no matter who they are