As it happened, the Manly Fireplug did not break up with me just for Dore Alley. On the contrary, we spent it side-by-side, in matching cash belts, slinging suds for my softball team, doing our best to contribute to the drunken kinky South of Market mayhem.

There comes a tipping point at Dore Alley and its big daddy Folsom Street Fair, just around 4 pm, when the crowd expands and slides from buzzed to messy, and when the smart find refuge behind a counter.

Not that I have an aversion to sweaty men in leather, but invariably there is some free spirited creature – boy, girl, or something in between – who’s doused themselves with a half dozen jars of glitter and I’m telling you now, when they rub up against you it’s all over –that shit never comes out.

But since I’ve been a little quiet around here all summer I figured I should at least share some pictures with you. Mostly out of vanity, yes, but I felt I deserved a reward for all the tedious tubs of cottage cheese and protein shakes I consumed. Keep in mind that as a college freshman I was an inch shy of six feet tall, and weighed all of 128 pounds. That toothpick kid still haunts me, though for motivational purposes alone it helps to have a few old ghosts kicking around your head.

San Francisco’s kink-themed street fairs are a good excuse to publicly tap into one’s inner bad boy while simultaneously incurring the wrath of our nation’s most pious Puritans (every year conservatives reliably wring their hands over the Folsom Street Fair). But that’s what makes living in this “bubble” so attractive: we have the numbers on our side, and local politicians need to curry the favor of even the kinky freaks, or at least get out of our way.

Having both given up pretty much every chemical vice many years ago (neither of us understands this thing called “moderation”), the Fireplug and I stick to the sexual ones these days, with one exception: the occasional nice big fat cigar. Last year we attended a sober conference in Palm Springs, but by far the best time we had that weekend was sneaking out to the Barracks and splitting a cigar with two guys, one of whom looked downright UNFAIR in a pair of chaps.

Of course the mild head buzz (no doubt from incorrectly inhaling too much, but that’s part of our charm) didn’t exactly hurt.

So naturally we split another fat one at Dore where, in spite of my general incompetence with all things technical, I happened to take the best picture I have ever taken in my entire life, thankfully of the best person I know:

I know I had more to write, but I’m a little distracted at the moment. Must scroll down, away from hot boyfriend.

So the tips we raked in at Dore went right to my softball team, the Lonestar Inferno D (Burn, baby, burn!) and five months after I timidly set foot on the field for that first day of practice, for my first season ever (as in, my entire life ever) we all flew off to beautiful Columbus, Ohio for the Gay World Series. Something like 150 teams descended on Columbus for their biggest sporting event ever.

Frankly I was still stunned at being there. One day in January, during that dark time when the Fireplug and I had called it quits, I happened to run into a casual friend who happened to mention that he was joining a softball team. Since I’d recently decided to Get Out There and Socialize More, and since this team happened to be in the D league, home to beginners and misfits and the somewhat-uncoordinated, I got on board. If you missed the ensuing journey, which did to me and for me far more than I ever could have anticipated, you can click on the “softball” tag at the end of this post.

Let’s just say that I never thought I’d be a part of something that would qualify for an event where “World Series” was part of the title.

And though we did not do as well as we had hoped there, winning three games and losing three games, we’d gone farther than the Inferno D team had ever gone before. And since I hit well enough to get on base most times at bat, and because I made one spectacular running low-ball catch from right field, I felt like I could safely say that I’d pulled my weight.

The Manly Fireplug came along for the ride, and the most important consequence of that trip is that the Fireplug got bit. By the softball bug. It had started a couple of weeks back, when we bought him a mitt and went across the street from my apartment to the little park, where he completely surprised himself by actually catching the ball. He had a good arm, too, much better than mine was at the beginning of the season. Then we took him to the batting cages, where he completely surprised himself by hitting the ball, over and over.

At both times I could see the Fireplug transform. He faced those old demons, common to gay boys everywhere, that told him he’d be inept at all things athletic, that he couldn’t measure up to other boys.  A couple of boyhood experiences only fed those demons. These are not demons you’d guess he’d carried, talking to him. Let’s just say that the Fireplug has taught me more about confidence than any other person. But most of us keep our demons out of sight.

And challenging those demons lit a fire in his belly. When he started talking about maybe joining the team next spring, I was at first a little wary. I’d started softball when we were apart, when I was a single man, and I still thought of it as “my thing.” I’d taken on softball, a sport for which I had no natural talent, to prove to myself that I could do something, and improve at something, all on my own.

But watching the Fireplug face down those demons, as I had done earlier in the season, and watching what it did to his soul, all I could think was, who the hell am I to stand in the way? And like, c’mon, me and him on the same team? Fun! Havoc!

Speaking of old demons, I’m still fleshing out and hacking away at my book, that memoir about my big gay family that I’ve been toiling at for oh, six years. Living in the past, resurrecting and wrestling with old demons, wishing many times that I had just for the love of God written fiction instead, where you can make things up!

This story demands the right emotional distance and tone on my part, otherwise it slides really fast into the Land of the Maudlin. It’s taken me six years to figure out that distance and that tone. I think I have it now, though truth be told I’ve thought that before, more than once.

You can’t wrestle with old demons for six years without noting a few uncomfortable truths. Like, I share some not very attractive traits with my parents. The kind that bounced off them and hit me, and then bounced off me, like an echo chamber. Oh there are good traits too, of course, but those don’t gnaw at me.

I’ve seen them play out over my life – traits like coldness, and a tendency to neglect loved ones. Traits that don’t exactly work in my favor, but are stubborn to change.

Today marks my fourth anniversary with the Fireplug. I’ve felt that coldness descend, the closer he gets to me, with confusion. It comes automatically, without my trying. Why would I feel cold towards the man who gives me everything I’ve ever wanted in a partner? I’m not even clear what exactly I’m trying to get at here, by talking about that coldness. By admitting it out loud. I’m still figuring it out.

But the good thing about being a grown-up is that you can try to change, sometimes only in little ways. I try to wake myself up, out of that coldness. I try to draw my own wandering, self-obsessed attention, back in his direction.

I overhear a conversation between two men at the gym, both of them detailing all of their recent acquisitions, their trips abroad, their re-decorations. The thought that comes to me : I’m so glad Joe doesn’t talk like that, a thought that comes and almost goes before I have a chance to note it, to note my luckiness in winding up with someone who talks about what lies under the skin, both in himself and in others.

I note the greater number of compliments I pay people, and I trace it back to Joe, who taught me to do so by example.

I note his phone calls home to family and the ties that bind them together.

The pride and ownership he takes of his business.

His pride and joy in even my smallest accomplishments.

The way he gets what writing means to me, and the way he makes room for it in our lives.

Our impossibly well-suited-for-each-other sexual natures.

The number of times he tells me he loves me everyday.

We settled on this anniversary because of something I once said. We’d been dating for a couple of months already, but that night, four years ago, he came home from a trip, and when we finally got a hold of each other, in my bedroom, I told him that I loved him.

I’d told him that before. “I love you,” I had said, a couple of times, but I don’t know if he really heard me. Sometimes we need to hear things a few times before they sink in.

But that night I said it differently. “I love you, Joe,” is what I said, right in his ear, and that one extra word made him hear it, really hear it, for the first time. And I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to to be deliberate, to stop relying on the automatic or assumed phrase, and to say the extra word that lets him know I’m paying attention.

“I think we need to take a break,” the Manly Fireplug told me. “I think we need to see other people. But only for Dore Alley.”

Fortunately this was not real-life Fireplug talking, but merely the Fireplug in last week’s nightmare. I used to be, in the beginning of our courtship, nearly four years ago, a jealous wreck of a man. But I thought those days were long gone. I felt secure in our whatever-you-want-to-label-it-ness. I no longer wasted time worrying if he would leave me, in part because he pretty much dotes on me all the time now.

Oh believe me, he tried in the beginning to resist my charms. But really, what chance did he have, once I’d made up my mind?

But apparently my subconscious is still an anxious amusement park filled with scary clowns and seductive porn stars. Because yes, in my nightmare I caught a glimpse of the Fireplug, hand-in-hand with some humpy little thing much closer in height to himself, traipsing through Dore Alley: a bullet shot straight through my heart.

Maybe you’ve never had nightmares that your boyfriend will leave you during a street fair devoted to half-naked kinky men from all over the planet. I suppose this might be a San Francisco-centric  nightmare. But any of us in any half-way sizable city can easily drive ourselves nuts fearing that the humpy number just around the next corner will woo our loved ones away.  Curse those next corners, they’re always holding back some temptation.

In real life I forestalled such tragedy by signing us both up for the beer booth at Dore Alley, where will we be slinging suds half the afternoon, side-by-side, getting the kinky fucks drunker and raking in the cash for my Gay World Series-bound softball team. Just like we did last month at Pride, pictured here (with our handsome, totally-single friend Lon: call him!), in a moment of tender capitalist camaraderie. What you don’t see is the leash around the Fireplug’s waist.

If you’d like us to get you closer to intoxication this Sunday, or if you want like a Diet Coke or something, come to our booth outside the Powerhouse between 3-6 pm, right about the time the crowd turns a tad messy. My team could use the cash.

So about two days after posting all about My Triumphs in D League Gay Softball, I hit a slump. At our last game of the regular season I struck out twice and eked out a couple of anemic singles. At our next practice, one of only two before play-offs, I swung and hit only air, and let more than a few grounders bounce past me on the manicured grass of the lonesome right field.

It was more than a little humiliating. Understandable, yes: common, no doubt. But still humiliating. The next morning I woke light-headed and thunder-pulsed, a dizzy sensation that would cling to me for the next seven days. My dreamy doctor prescribed an echocardiogram and then ran off to Bear Week in Provincetown. I holed up, ate massive plates of pasta for the first time in months, wrote nothing, and watched reruns of Veronica Mars, missing the final practice before play-offs.

I woke the first morning of play-offs still light-headed and quick-pulsed, but determined to at least show up for moral support. The winner of the play-offs would qualify for the Gay World Series in glamorous Columbus, Ohio. But our team had finished the season fifth out of seven teams. To win playoffs we’d have to win six out of seven games over the next two days, a doubtful proposition.

Our first game was against a team we’d been 0 for 2 against during the season, so I figured I’d rest my dizzy head while warming the bench, shouting out the occasional Inferno cheer and offering my condolences afterwards.

Yeah, right. We fucking won.

And watching that felt so good that I played the next three games, poorly again, though the rest of my team did well enough that we won two of them. We still had a shot the next day. The adrenaline seemed to knock the dizziness from my head, and I went home that night feeling pretty damn good.

I came back the next morning, the Manly Fireplug in tow, just as dizzy as before. Worse, in the intervening night I’d had a Mildly Traumatic Event. I need to stay vague about this Mildly Traumatic Event for various reasons, so my apologies to you for kinda sorta leading you on.

I say mildly because no one was killed. I was not hurt. The Manly Fireplug was not hurt. No family or friends or little red terrier were hurt. But the memory of the event clung to me over the night and through the next day, the second day of play-offs. And between the memory of the event and the return of my dizziness, I was one bummed dude. I was sick and scared and stuck in my head, and I did the one thing I’d never done, all season long.

I gave up.

I told the coach the dizziness was back, keeping the other details to myself, and spent the rest of the day avoiding her eye. I hung back.

And watched my team win the whole fucking thing.

Yep, we won the next three games, the last two in a row against the top-seeded team, and we routed them.

It was thrilling. It was heartening in a way I can hardly describe. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had with another group of people, and I’m so glad that I was there.

The thrill, of course, was tempered, for all the reasons you might expect. I had wanted so badly to take part, to pull my weight and help my team reach that unlikely victory. But I couldn’t do it. I went home that night with a complicated heart.

The dizziness cleared. My dreamy doctor is still, as I write this, at Bear Week, and I have yet to learn the results of my test, but my symptoms have cleared up, and yesterday I drove down to the batting cages and swung until the sweat flew from my arms.

And next month I will travel with my team to Coumbus where no doubt I will spend most of the week warming a bench or two, something I will be happy to do, cheering on my team.

Thank you, D league softball, for giving me a little more confidence, even if I sometimes lose track of it. And thank you Inferno, my team, my comrades, you unlikely band of rag-tag misfits, for proving that you can still come from behind and kick some major ass. Flame on!

Since then I’ve stayed stuck in my head. Sometimes something hurls at you through the cover of night, colliding with you and jarring you awake. Last weekend was like that. I had somewhere somehow once again lost my way.

I’d stopped working on my book, had taken up with softball and the gym and looking good. I get that way sometimes. It’s hard for me to balance the physical and the cerebral, the short-term gains of hot pecs with the long-term gains of creative expression. I don’t do balance well, but then one does not develop a daily affection for crystal meth, say, if one has a talent for moderation. I find it easier to lift weights than to write a paragraph, and sometimes I get lazy.

And though I’ve become a better softball player, in secret I know the score. I will never be a better player than a writer. And I need to write. Which is rather too bad, in matters of paycheck and practicality. But it’s too late now, that die was cast way too long ago.

It took me a few days to get back to this, to get less scared and less stuck. To turn off Veronica Mars and sit down and log off and open a new document, a blank white screen, the blinking cursor that I chase with one word, then two.

Over the weekend I did the following:

• Missed the Manly Fireplug, who was off getting his hotness documented in Joshua Tree by photographer Michael Alago, of ROUGH GODS fame. I seriously cannot wait to see the results.
• Bid goodbye to my sweet if slightly old-fashioned blog template
• Picked a new template that offers some shiny new features:

1. A feed from my Twitter account, in case you’re not already sick of my my blathering
2. The option, at the bottom of each post, to “share” my blathering across a wide range of social media outlets, as if you were spreading the flu
3. An alphabetized links list (don’t ask me why this wasn’t working on the last template)
4. A mobile version for those of you stuck on MUNI with only an iPhone to distract you from the surrounding inhumanity.

• Played a double header with my softball team. I’ve since found that gay men find the term “double header” amusing
• Struck out my first time at bat. Despaired.
• Then hit three singles, each single going a little bit farther, though I can’t really be certain since I was so busy high-tailing it to first base to bother looking at where the ball ended up
• Got my first RBI
• Crossed home plate twice, which a helpful reader advised me meant my team got a “run,” not a “point”
• Felt a nice rush of euphoria and camaraderie when we won the double header (insert pun here)
• Have been hobbling around my apartment ever since. Hightailing it to first base leads to pulled hamstrings.
• Received a very funny invitation which I will tell you about tomorrow. It involves musclebears. And pastels.

Maybe you think I’ve been taking this whole gay softball thing far too seriously. Well, now three bisexual men have sued the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance after their team was stripped of its second place finish in the Gay Softball World Series. The three men were grilled on their private sex lives and determined to be non-gay. This raises a whole series of issues regarding discrimination, freedom of association, the fearsome ire of pissed-off queens, and that whole icky question re: do straight men make better ball players? (No pun intended.)

Since I’ve been a part of the D league all of two months, I’m steering clear of that can of worms. But it did make me realize that I have no close straight male friends, and I haven’t had any since college. Due to living in San Francisco, where you can make your life as gay as an Easter bonnet.

Back in college I met Jake, a straight guy who drove a pick-up and took off one weekend a month for the Marine Reserves. He wore a crew cut and wife beaters, and liked to poke fun at his fish-out-of-water reputation at our school, known for its retro-hippie culture. He came from a Florida town called Jupiter, which he made sound like a glorified trailer park, and he spoke with a small-town drawl that didn’t quite count as southern.

He’d transferred to New College during my third year, and I used to watch him walk around campus with his bow-legged gait. Our school had all of 600 students, and there wasn’t much else to look at. By fate he was given the gayest roommate ever, a hairdresser from Jacksonville, whom I’d befriended. I invited myself over to their room a couple of times and did my best to charm Jake with my gay-but-totally-non-threatening demeanor.

That year Act-UP boys were shaving their heads and walking around the East Village in hot pants and combat boots, and I followed them through the pages of magazines. When I told Jake I’d been thinking of buzzing my head, he insisted on helping. Every week or so I’d sit in a chair in his bathroom. Jake would grab a pair of clippers from his regulation footlocker, strip down to his olive-colored boxers, and work on my head. Every once in awhile he’d absently brush his formidable package against the back of my neck.

That was pretty much how it went for us. I spent the next couple of years lusting after a boy who genuinely liked me, a boy whose motives I often had reason to question. He liked talking with me one-on-one, picking me up in his truck and driving me out to some deserted beach at night, where we’d joke around and trade war stories from our dismal love lives. Sitting next to me under a tree he told me that I had a very distinct scent. I don’t think he found it offensive.

He didn’t do such a great job buzzing my head; I bought my own pair of clippers to trim down the rough patches when I got home, but I never told him. Those weekly cuts were among the most erotic moments of my young life – the seed for my later love of barbers.

Jake knew how I felt about him, and one night after he’d had a couple of beers he confessed that he’d been having strange feelings. He told me how much he liked me and that he found himself wondering what it would be like to sleep next to me. Not sleep WITH me, NEXT TO me. Of course this thrilled me, but his own confession troubled him – I think it made him question too many things, and he got so anxious that he nearly threw up. I thought our friendship had come to an end that night.

But that awkwardness faded pretty quick. Another evening, before a party I was hosting, he came over to my place and suggested that we take a nap, so that we’d have the energy to stay up late. As we lay side-by-side in bed he stroked his bare chest and remarked on the curliness of his chest hair. “Here, feel it,” he said, and grabbed my hand. He laid it on his chest but after a second I snatched it away. So close to what I’d been wanting for so long, and so scared to fuck it up, I rolled over on my side, away from him.

I graduated in the spring of ’93. The night before I left Florida for good he drove us down to the bayshore. “There’s been so many times,” he told me, “that I wished I were gay, because I get along with you better than any girl I’ve ever known.” I silently cursed our fate, but his words weren’t lost on me. They made the night and its memory bittersweet.

Over the years I’ve regretted the moment that I took my hand away from his chest, sure that I’d blown the only chance he’d given me. A couple of times in a fit of nostalgia I tracked him down and we exchanged emails. He’d ended up with a nomadic life, working as a federal firefighter, hanging his hat in various cheap motels long enough to put out wildfires. As far as I could tell he’d stayed straight, and though I always wanted to ask him about his motives with me back in college, I left the subject alone.

I think I might have done the right thing, taking my hand away. Jake wanted something other than sex from me – he wanted a kind of intimacy, the kind rare between men, the kind more easily pursued in college, after we’ve left our families and younger selves behind, and before our identities have calcified. He’d given me a type of affection I’d never felt before or since, something made sweeter by the boundary between us.

If it ain’t clear by now, let it be known that I am constitutionally incapable of doing things “just for fun.” I joined D league gay softball more or less as a social outlet, but within a week my ruthlessly competitive bastard emerged. Competing, naturally, with myself. Not being good at something, in public, was slightly…uncomfortable.

Yes, we are talking D league gay softball – the stakes couldn’t have been lower. The D league’s just for fun, right?

At 39 years of age I’ve come to the conclusion that you can either beat your head against the wall trying to turn into one of those “just for fun” guys, or you can channel that ruthless bastard and deal with the sometimes painful fallout as you go.

So I hit every practice with focus, if not finesse, and hit the batting cages on my own time three weeks in a row. I listened to my coach and the other players. I tried my best to learn while exhibiting a lot of failure.

I steadily, if very slowly, improved at practice, hitting and fielding a little more reliably each time. But that was at practice. Games were another matter. My breathing changed at games; all my air came from the top of my lungs, tight, like my demented heart was wringing out my chest. I never got on base.

My goal was simple: hit a fucking single. One base. One little base, and we’d go from there. Our next two games were rained out, so I had a little more time to both practice and freak myself out with building dread.

At today’s game I got two times at bat. The first time I walked; my one success there was that I didn’t swing at any bad pitches, but the relief was minor. It was a spectacular day in San Francisco, warm, blue-skyed, at a field down in the Marina. I barely noticed.

My second time at bat came in the last inning. We were down by four runs. We had runners at first and second, with two outs. If I struck out the game would be over. If I popped up the game would be over.

I stepped into the box, my mouth dried out. I racked up two balls and one strike. After each pitch I’d take a look at the bat in my hands and try to fill the bottom of my lungs. Then I’d breathe out and look at the pitcher. Eye on the ball, eye on the ball, all the way in, see the ball hit the bat…

The ball hit the bat.

A nice solid grounder – I dropped the bat and took off, pumping my legs, running through the first base. Safe.

I did not strike out. I did not end the game. I hit a fucking single.

The next batter got me to second, and the next batter got me home. I crossed that plate feeling like a D league God.

We lost the game by one point, but I hardly cared. I stood in the dugout, my legs trembling. All of that pressure I’d put on myself. All of that work. All of that worry. I’d merely hit a single, in D league gay softball. But this wasn’t ever just about D league gay softball. It was about taking a risk at something for which I had no natural talent. It was about courting risk: the risk of disappointing others, the risk of looking stupid in public. The risk of working your ass off towards a goal but still failing.

I felt like I’d broken a curse. I’d proved to myself that I could hit a ball at a game. It was all a bit much for me; I’m here to tell you that yeah, I got choked up. But I turned and faced away from the field, since there’s no crying in softball.

Nothing brings out the knives like earnest success. Some people get jealous of the glamour of D league gay softball. Like the two boys a few weekends ago who watched our practice at the fields on the corner of Portrero and Cesar Chavez Streets. They leaned against their Cadillac with obviously fragile machismo, sipping forties, clearly threatened by our display of athletic grace. Every once in a while they’d elbow each other and toss a little comment over the fence:

“There’s no crying in softball!”

Nobody was crying, at least not at that particular moment. But that doesn’t matter to the haters. One of the hard lessons that every D leaguer must learn is that your fame will make others uncomfortable. It’s a sad lesson, sure, but understandable. Few can play softball like we do.

In case you’d like more D league glamor in your life than you can vicariously pick up from this blog, I’m happy to report that the Inferno team will be hosting another BEER BUST at the Lone Star, tomorrow (Saturday) from 3-7 pm. We will come straight from practice, sweaty and rumpled, which some of you perverts seem to appreciate. Members of the C team will also be in attendance, an embarrassment of riches for softball fans.

In the extremeley unlikely event that you care nothing for softball, then I would like to point out, again, that this is a BEER BUST and there will be lots of BEER available.

BEER, Homer.

I know what you’re thinking. Once you join the Gay Softball League your life must be cake. You get a sports cup and a baseball cap and suddenly everyone wants to know you. They shower you with gifts and sexual favors, and strangers snap your picture as you run errands, aching for a fleeting glimpse of D league glamor. Well I’m here to tell you that fame comes with a price tag.

I’ve been sore since the middle of February.

You think I’m exaggerating. One week we field ground balls, the next fly balls. My trips to the batting cages have improved my swing, sure, but every other day muscles I didn’t even know I had complain. It’s hard to appreciate the glamor while limping around like Quasimodo. I live in an apartment with 732 stairs.

I’m long past the age of 21, a fact that becomes apparent with a glimpse at my medicine cabinet. When I was 21 I had only toothpaste and cologne (it was the early 90′s, people.) I’ve since ditched the fragrance, but the shelves of my cabinet are now overrun with Clearasil, Advil, Immodium, and Gas-X. There I find evidence of past phases: Kiehl’s, when I took moisturizing seriously. Jack Black, when that mean lady at Nordstrom’s said my neck looked razor-burned.

The fast, free-wheeling days of my youth have faded, and now my travel kit is stuffed to the gills with products picked up during past emergencies. Visine. Zantac. Gun Oil. I used to hit the clubs with nothing but youth fueling me. Now I need two Red Bulls and a fist full of Aleve.

Nobody likes a cranky celebrity. Complaining about fame is so petty. But I do this as public service announcement for all those starry-eyed boys who lie awake at night, dreaming of the D league. Yes, a delicious sense of power, as you slide your cup into place, awaits you. But so do the consequences. Your hamstrings will hurt. For three months.

Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Oops! Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball.