It could be argued that this another "inevitability" that comes with residing in Portland. If you live in this city long enough, you're bound to allow pub quizzes, coffeeshop loitering and kickball into your life, at some point. At least I've held off on adopting a pug.

Joining a kickball team is a lot like joining a fraternity. A co-ed fraternity where everyone is between the ages of 21 and 50 and gathers together on Sundays to drink cheap beer, cover themselves in mud, chase around rubber balls and gossip about one another. There's more personal drama wafting around my league than 40 years worth of Days of Our Lives episodes. At times I feel like I need a flow chart to keep up with the rivalries and track of who's sleeping with who and why one Girl X refuses to talk to Guy Y. Like a frat house, there's feuds, legends surrounding longtime members and enough inappropriate nicknames to keep former members of the Bush cabinet giggling well into Obama's second term.

Take, for example, one charismatic team captain who uses the league as his own personal "lady buffet" and finds himself continually struggling to keep his various lovers from engaging in fist fights in the middle of games. I could bring up some further anecdotes but there's always the chance that a teammate will come across this blog post. If that happened, I'd get cut from the team, or worse yet, spend the rest of the season with the nickname "That Asshole Blogger." Regardless, I'm sure that by mid-season someone who has been missing for the last five seasons will mysteriously return one afternoon to retake his position as an outfielder, proving wrong the assumption that he died in a tragic taxi bike accident in the Pearl District.

And I guess there's also the camaraderie, the friendly competition and the occasional complimentary polish dog. All in all, this old Onion article does sum up all the whole phenomenom of hipster sports leagues pretty well.

Labels: sports