I play in a pickup baseball game in Brooklyn on weekends. I’ve mentioned this before a few times, at greatest length here.

I’m a terrible defender but a decent hitter, at least for level. I usually manage to put the ball in play, and since errors abound, I often end up on base. I don’t have much power but I handle fastballs pretty well. There aren’t many regular pitchers in the game who can blow one past me, and I’m usually patient enough to lay off or foul off offspeed stuff until I get something straight to hit. Plus I got off to a hot start this spring — seeing the ball well, driving a couple legit extra-base hits to the gaps in the first few games, poking some singles over infielders’ heads.

On Sunday, though, I guess I came in to the game with a little too much confidence. We switch up the teams every week, and I wound up facing the game’s lone lefty junkballer, a shrewd musician with a frustrating array of breaking stuff.

I’ve faced the dude enough times to know how I should approach him — wait and wait and wait and wait. Don’t bother trying to drive the ball because it’s not going to happen. Just take pitches until he’s forced to throw a strike, then try to go with a pitch or work out a walk.

But screw that, I roped a double last week! I’M BIG-TIME POWER BRO! So in my first at-bat I dug in and crouched deep like a fool, prepared to put a hurting on one, eying that 320-foot left field wall as if I’ve ever hit a home run in my damn life. On my third huge, awful swing, I tapped out to the pitcher.

Humbled, I decided to adjust my approach the second time up. I stood up a little straighter, trying to use the wrist-hitting style I honed in years of dedicated backyard Wiffle-ball play. Still couldn’t hit him, though. I managed to foul a couple off and wound up walking, but the whole time I felt generally uncomfortable.

Before my third plate appearance, the southpaw grew wild and got pulled from the game, and our opponents turned to a hard-throwing righty that I’ve hit OK in the past. He got ahead of me quickly, though, and after five straight fastballs he struck me out swinging on a 2-2 curveball that fooled me so thoroughly it had me laughing out loud before it reached the plate (and somewhere midway through my flailing off-balance whiff).

I came up for the fourth and final time with one out, nobody on and my team down 7-3 in our last licks at the plate. Another new pitcher was on for the bad guys, a guy who throws almost exclusively fastballs, mixing in the occasional curveball that he struggles to control.

By now, though, I’m lost in the batter’s box. The first pitch waes a pin-straight fastball down the middle, and I just looked at it. The second was a fastball low and inside, but I swung anyway and fouled it straight down into the dirt. The third pitch was obviously a wild curveball from the moment it left his hand, spinning toward my front knee. For some reason, as I stepped out of the way I took a godawful hack out of it. But the barrel of the bat made solid contact with the ball, smacking it down the third-base line for a single.

A few batters later, we wound up with a walk-off win. Baseball is awesome like that sometimes. Most times, really.