HEMPFIELD — Baseball dad Bill Mortimer attended a Zoom meeting with his son’s coach yesterday wearing his wraparound sunglasses and menacingly striking the palm of his left hand with a fist, according to sources who had to insist repeatedly that they needn’t discuss matters in a parking lot over a few Miller High Lifes and a “wad of dip.”
“I was hoping the distance might cool Bill’s rather…infamous temper,” said head coach Jim Byers, muting his phone in anticipation of Mortimer’s typical “barrage” of follow-up texts, “but he just seemed more desperate to exert his dominance, hence the constant loosening up of his ‘flamethrower’ arm and attempts to show off his bald eagle tattoo. Christ, by the end I was just happy he had stopped revving his Camaro.”
Byers explained that the odd exchange belonged to one of the many with the “almost criminally passionate” Mortimer.
“Bill links me to four-hour homemade videos of breakdown and analysis after every game in the spring,” he said. “Plus he’ll put DVD copies in my mailbox, ‘just in case.’ Yet when I see him at, say, the grocery store during the off-season, he’ll pretend to think I’m one of the store associates. Then when the week before tryouts rolls around, there he is again, ‘accidentally’ video-chatting me several times a day of him at the cages ‘cranking homers.'”
As of press time, sources in Mortimer’s neighborhood say he was preparing for a potential in-person meeting with Byers by learning to kick gravel at someone’s shins from six feet away.
