In 2014, I was a sophomore at Yorktown High School. I was working hard in my AP Biology class, practicing for my driver’s test, and continuing to grow my already substantial collection of brightly colored Abercrombie, Hollister, and American Eagle shirts. Even more importantly, though, I was playing baseball. In fact, I had just gotten the call that every sophomore baseball player spends their entire semester hoping for: I was being called up from the JV team to the full-on Varsity baseball squad.
In one of my first ever games on the varsity roster, we faced a school outside of our league, both metaphorically and in a literal sense. The team was Rye, and their pitcher was George Kirby, a top player in Westchester county and a soon-to-be top player in the entire state.
George threw a fantastic game, going six scoreless innings while only giving up two hits. I batted second, played right field, and, incredibly, got one of those two hits off of Kirby.1
Let’s fast forward nine years. Present day, I am an advertising coordinator who takes the co-ed softball league that I’m in far too seriously. George Kirby, the man who I am hitting lifetime .333 off of, is a Major League pitcher for the Seattle Mariners. In his first ever MLB start last week, Kirby threw 6 scoreless innings and struck out seven members of the Tampa Bay Rays. Guess how many times I struck out against George in my career? That’s right, zero.
If you aren’t familiar with the transitive property of equality, the concept is fairly simple. If A is equal to B and B is equal to C, then A must be equal to C. Similarly, if George Kirby is able to strike out seven members of the Tampa Bay Rays, then I, who not only didn’t strike out against George but even got a hit off of him, must be as good, if not better than the Major League hitters in the Tampa Bay Rays organization.
Tonight, George Kirby faces off against my favorite team, the New York Mets, and I will be going to the game in order to remind him that although he might be making millions of dollars and have reached the highest possible level of baseball in the world, he was still absolutely owned by a sophomore at Yorktown High School named Andrew Greene.
The hit was an unimpressive dribbler to the third base side, but it was a hit nonetheless.
can i come