Free American Thighs by Jill Conner Browne Page A

dim-witted, and, oddly enough, severely visually impaired individuals who have somehow become immovably embedded in the infrastructure of the game on a worldwide level and have, for reasons best known to themselves, dedicated their very lives to Ruining the Game for Everybody Else—so anytime the ratbastard ump would happen to make a call with which the beer-soaked gang agreed, such a rare call would bring forth a frenzy of “GOOD EYEs!” for him, too, but he would ignore them, just as he most often did the tremendous volume of less-than-complimentary taunts flung his way during the course of a normal game.
    We, the female contingent of the third-base bleacher bums, had not spent the preceding years of our respective youths playing or watching endless hours of baseball, so we weren’t really up on all the lingo associated with the game. There were, of course, the occasional Moms with Sons over there in the good seats (the ones with backs) behind home plate. As part of the penalty for having produced more penis-bearing people for the planet, for many years their lives had been not so much more than just so many interminable chains of T-ball, Little League, and whatever comes after that, so THEY HAD spent many, many endless hours watching baseball, and thus they were likely to be quite conversant in the lexicon of the game, but we were still young, childless, and blissfully ignorant of, well, pretty much everything. Baseball and all its culture was only one small and comparatively unimportant entry on the very long list of shit we didn’t know diddly about.
    But we have never been accused of allowing our state of being uninformed on a particular subject to interfere with our enthusiasm for it, especially if it in any way involved hot guys. We were there, soaking up rays, refreshing summer beverages, and admiring glances—we were happy, we knew it, and we clapped our hands. But we were also anxious to participate verbally whenever possible even though we weren’t quite sure what sapient contributions we should shout or when the appropriate time for such cheers and jeers might occur. We instinctively knew that “BINGO!” while admittedly one of our very favorite words to yell in any crowd, would not serve us well in this environment.
    We made a cursory attempt at correlating, in our minds, the various incomprehensible phrases our guy friends were yelling with the events that were unfolding on the field before us at a snail’s pace, but we soon lost interest since it clearly was not about US in any remote way. But we heard the “good eye” thing so many times during this one particularly boring game, it caught our attention, and so whenever we heard it, we would focus our gaze intently on the player at whom it seemed to be directed, in order to make our own eye-assessment of the individual.
    It didn’t take us but a second to determine that from our vantage point in the third-base bleachers, one could not actually SEE the EYES of anybody on the field, player or otherwise,and so, until we could examine them closely for ourselves, we were not prepared to be hollering out our endorsement of them for all to hear.
    During the course of coming to this conclusion, however, we did make a very important observation that I’m sure, once shared, will improve the viewing prospect for all future baseball games for women everywhere: some guys do manage to look really good in a baseball uniform. Mookie Wilson and Keith Bodie were two such guys. This seemingly small, but for us salient, point just changed the whole game for us.
    With at least one of them destined to become a superstar of the game, they were immediately seen as stellar in our sight for reasons that had little to do with their admittedly outstanding performances regularly delivered during the course of the games. As a result of our newfound and heartfelt appreciation for their appearance in their little baseball outfits, we