Hitting books not easy
DIXON – There were plenty of people to feel for Thursday during Sterling’s 21-0 softball rout of Dixon.
After a while, the umpires, the fans, the catchers, and pretty much everyone wearing purple had a hard time enjoying themselves.
For my money, the afternoon’s toughest task went to Sterling’s Adrienne Martinez and Dixon’s Josie Willett – the girls who keep each team’s scorebook.
If you’ve ever kept score, you know what a nightmare it must have been to keep track of a team that scored 21 runs and batted around three times in five innings. That’s what Martinez and Willett did, with pencil in hand and a book filled with eraser marks.
“It can get hectic at times,” Martinez said. “In a game like this, it takes a while to get everything straight.”
Martinez is a senior reserve infielder for the Golden Warriors. Willett is a freshman who, after trying out and not making the team at Dixon, decided she still would contribute.
She’s been doing that all season as a varsity manager.
“I wanted to stay involved,” Willett said. “I thought I’d give this a shot, and it’s been a lot of fun.”
Willett never kept score before this season, so it’s been a learning experience. She’s been a quick study, and said she had things under control for most of Thursday’s game.
“A couple of times it got really confusing,” Willett said, noting the two times Sterling runners were called out for leaving their base early. “Other than that, though, I think I did pretty good.”
Martinez is a scorekeeping veteran, picking up the skill when she was a young player and staying with it through the years. If you ever get to the park late and need to know what you missed, Adrienne is the girl you need to see.
“I enjoy it, I really do,” Martinez said. “It keeps me in the game, and I learn a lot by doing it.”
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t occasionally get thrown off, like when Sterling scored nine runs in the first inning.
“The trick when that happens,” Martinez explained, “is to figure out where the runners are at. Then you work backwards and figure everything out from there.”
While Martinez loves keeping the book, she’d much rather be on the field. That happy ending happened Thursday, when she scored a run as a courtesy runner in the fourth inning and reached base on an error in the fifth.
When Martinez took her spot at second base, she handed off the book to her understudy – senior foreign-exchange student and manager Anne-Claire Fouchier.
“I’ve been teaching her all year long,” Martinez said. “I think she’s starting to get the hang of it.”
Willett won’t see the field this season, but she still has hopes of somebody writing her name in the lineup some day.
“I think I’ll try out again,” she said. “Next year is a whole new year, and who knows what can happen.”
