Why My Wife Wouldn't Go to Rules Meetings

Dec. 1, 2014 – Carl Gustafson CA Regional Tri-Director (San Diego)

My wife wouldn’t go. She scheduled a dental appointment in preference.

A national rules committee session couldn’t compete with a turtle race for entertainment value. I suspect that turtles would indeed race—to get away from hearing old people debate rules.

The annual convention was in Tupelo, Mississippi this year.

Hey, I hear you; we couldn’t figure it out either. Maybe it was the Elvis Museum? But not even baby Elvis could lure my wife to attend.

As boring as these meetings seem to an outsider, they can ignite the emotions of those who play this game when the results are announced.

That’s because you can’t please everyone on all sides of any issue. Rule changes that make one group tap dance and play kazoos, might make another mad enough to get out their catapults and siege Sacramento. The rules committee knows this only too well.

It’s kind of like Popeye’s father singing, “It ain’t easy being me,” because there’s much misperception about how and why rules and policies are decided, and some take it personally.

You might like to know that whatever opinions you hold, were heard and argued on all sides, complete with a nice complement of emotion, sarcasm, recalcitrance, suspicion of motive, and harangues long enough to make the Elvis statue appear animated in comparison.

The computer age furnished the committee with so many e-mails from softballers all over the country, that when printed out would make Santa jealous. We waded through them all, both naughty and nice. After awhile I begin to hope that Terry Hennessy would read the letters with different voices, like my Dad did for Winnie-the-Pooh characters, but he never got in that spirit, so they sounded the same. The rules committee has umpires, managers, tournament directors, administrators—all have played lots of softball, at every competitive level and age group. Some of the old umpires are used to contention and are saltier than a biscuit at the Cowboy Poets convention in Elko, Nevada.

The committee begins with the premise that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and then argues like a gallery of kibitzers at a chess tournament. In the end they all believe they did the best they could to make the most players happy while preserving the integrity of the game.