by Kevin Burton
Don’t know how much I will play at the 2023 Beep Baseball World Series or how well I will do. But I know one thing: My shoes will fit.
And that’s a very good start.
My high school math teacher wrote down “Yale” as a suggestion for where I should send my SAT scores. We made eye contact but never talked about that. I wish I had that slip of paper for proof, because I’m not feeling like a genius right now.
I think I already wrote about buying new cleats on vacation in South Dakota two years ago, in case I ever played any more beep baseball. A relative had given me a Dick’s Sporting Goods gift card and I didn’t know what else to use it for.
I bought some size 10 ½ shoes that were notable so I thought, only for their garish white orange-pink-yellow-light blue color. They stayed in their box, with the tag on even, until this year.
I signed on to play for the Cleveland Scrappers, in part to be reunited with some of my old Columbus Vipers team mates. This was part of re-learning how to have fun after the worst of the virus scare had passed.
I actually played two painful regional tournaments in June, wearing these shoes, before figuring out they just didn’t fit. I bought these shoes after answering the question “are they size 10½” not bothering to answer the question “do they fit,” because as far as I knew that was asking the same thing.
So here’s a ray of illumination from my would-be rival school Harvard.
“By the time you reach your 50th birthday, you’ve probably also reached another milestone: you’ve put 75,000 miles on your feet. You may reach this milestone much earlier if you’ve led a foot-active lifestyle,” reads a health report from Harvard Medical School. “By age 50, you may have lost nearly half of the fatty padding on the soles of your feet. And you may be wearing a shoe that’s a size bigger than what you wore in your 20s, in part because of weight gain that puts greater pressure on your feet, and in part because your ligaments and tendons have lost some of their elasticity (which also predisposes them to potentially painful ruptures or microtears).”
I had no idea, even with some painful clues. Looks as if I’m just not good at being old yet.
Years ago I read about something called “the Size 8 myth.” In the clothing industry. It was said that a woman who wore a size 8 dress all her life will not buy anything but that. So manufacturers just increased the size of garments they labelled as “8.”
At first I thought my shoe problem was some sort of reverse Size 8 myth whereby shoes sizes got smaller. I despaired that I would have to take the equivalent of a metric system converter chart with me, just to buy shoes.
The reality is even worse.
I haven’t felt this stupid since I sat on the floor of a London hotel room, slack-jawed, staring at some weird opening where the electric socket should have been. We were on our honeymoon.
I slumped down, electric razor in my left hand, wondering what my new bride would think of me with, six, seven, eight days’ worth of beard.
Within a few minutes she walked in, saw me sitting there and handed me the electric converter she had brought. Someone gave it to her at her bridal shower. I told her we didn’t need it because I had been to Taiwan and the electrical sockets there were the same as ours.
Of course before she gave me the converter my dismay was heightened by the fact that I had told her to leave the converter at home.
For the record, the new shoes are just a touch bigger than I need (and were twice the price I wanted to pay). I think I now need an 11½ but Sports Authority, where I was shopping, did not have a lot of half sizes. I got size 12.
But they are going to work, I’m good. I’ve got my new knee pads, compression shorts and shoes. I am hoping to not see the inside of a sporting goods store for a long, long time.
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