The Slice: Home to the diamondbacks

This isn’t something that usually comes up when managers and umpires go over the ground rules before the first pitch.

Back in the 1960s, Steven Stuart played for a Babe Ruth League baseball team made up of boys from around Cataldo and Rose Lake in Idaho.

“Our field was, to be polite, less than pristine. One day, while reaching for a grounder, I was startled to have a garter snake wriggle past my glove. Needless to say, the ball got behind me.”

How would you score that?

Speaking of encounters with snakes …

Once when he was a Boy Scout in California in the early 1970s, Curt Olsen was struggling with his breathing during a group hike. Then he almost stepped on a sunbathing rattlesnake. “Being 3 feet away from a coiled and not happy snake provided more than enough adrenaline to cure the asthma.”

This isn’t how you play through: “I remember very clearly being hit between the shoulder blades by someone’s tee shot,” wrote Cheryl Ferguson.

It happened on a golf course in Moses Lake.

“I felt something hit me in the back so hard that it knocked the breath out of me. I remember screaming expletives and dropping to my knees.”

Yes, it left a mark.

“What began as a small, very round red spot (no dimple marks) soon became a bruise of many colors that covered the upper half of my back.”

Fans of the movie “Caddyshack” might wonder if she was playing ahead of the Dali Lama. She wasn’t. It was someone way less enlightened.

Today’s theoretical tattoo: “I am over 60,” wrote Shirley Schrawyer. “Never had a tattoo. If I were to get one, I would get one of a blue carnation with the initials EJW and a little ribbon below, on my upper chest (close to my heart) in honor of my son, Erik, who passed away when he was 4.”

Slice answer: “I love to complain about lousy food and small portions of it,” said John Petrofski.

Today’s Slice question: If you were in charge of the world, would you do away with the practice of tipping (in the gratuity sense)?