After the jump, a recap of last night’s softball game against Vanity Fair.

TPR 6 | VF 2

In his first start of the season, David “Strasburg” Kanon turned in a complete game for the win, keeping the Veefers scoreless of six out of seven innings. Although you couldn’t see it on the mound, Kanon later admitted that his arm “felt like jello at the end.” The team doctors have put him on a regimen of ice baths and frosty lagers. Other defensive highlights include great running catches by newcomer Andrew Smeall and our newest editor Stephen Hiltner, pro-quality work at first base by Paul Wachter, expert catching and pitch-calling by Louisa Thomas, and a number of stunning grabs—despite a sprained wrist—by our grizzled eighteen-year-old intern Marshall Bradlee.

Joining Smeall and Thomas in their TPR softball debut was Belfast’s own Patrick Loughran, who confessed before the game that he’d never played baseball or softball before, but that he had “played rounders in primary school.” Your faithful captain nodded sagely, but had to wait until after the game to Google “rounders.” (Wikipedia: “Especially amongst girls, the game is popular in the UK and Ireland for schoolchildren.”) It was apparently experience enough, as Loughran joined Pashman, Camp, Kanon, Cox, and Wallace-Wells for a full trip around the bases, giving us a total of seven surnames and six runs for the Parisian side.

And that was the way it went: we sent batter after batter from VF back to the dugout, while at bat TPR racked up the runs with smart hitting and canny base running. Along the way we saw the long-awaited return of Josh Kendall to the line-up; Ben Wizner’s creative invoking of the infield-fly rule to argue against the tagging out one of our base runners, in the grand tradition of a lawyer valiantly defending a guilty client; and a powerful slide by Josh “11” Pashman to third base that resulted in an error and our final run of the game.

Just as the game wrapped up, and Vanity Fair was left to make peace with its disappointing loss, an otherworldly rainbow stretched itself across Central Park, proof that the gods of weather and softball fortune were with us. The crew repaired to a nearby watering hole to celebrate the victory, while the Veefers—gentlemen and ladies on the field but petulant in defeat—wandered off into the night, dazed and blinking.