They ain’t messing around at The New York Times and The Huffington Post.  

Both news organizations were the sites of indoor batting practice sessions on Tuesday, in preparation for Wednesday evening’s Congressional Women’s Softball Game . The annual match between female members of Congress and the women of the Washington press corps. The game benefits the Young Survival Coalition,  a breast cancer charity. Tickets can be purchased here .  

Over at the Times, bureau chief Carolyn Ryan is taking her game debut so seriously that she and day editor Jill Agostino regularly hold pepper drills in Ryan’s office.  

“I think it speaks volumes about our confidence going into the game that Carolyn wanted to play pepper in her glass-enclosed office,” New York Times junior reporter Emmarie Huetteman observed.  

Ryan, Agostino and Huetteman joined the softball team thanks to the scouting efforts of press coach and New York Times chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse.  

As if she needed any more initiation, Ryan found herself sucked into a Twitter fight with the game’s founder, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., over the last 24 hours.  

Step One: Ready the Batting Stance

   

Step Two: Follow through on the swing

   

Step Three: Don’t break stuff

And over at The Huffington Post, reporters Elise Foley and Jennifer Bendery held their own practice session, and things got a bit dangerous.  

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8wkBGzw0Lo  

CNN’s Lisa Desjardins and Real Clear Politics’ Caitlin Huey-Burns followed up with their own impromptu practice on the Senate side of the Capitol using an edition of Roll Call as a makeshift baseball bat while waiting for senators to exit their weekly lunches.  

“My pitching skills there don’t even come close to those Babe’s star pitcher Carrie Budoff Brown,” Huey-Burns wrote in an email to the team. “Lisa was hitting with today’s edition of Roll Call for good luck. 🙂 Heitkamp was still in lunch or else she would have been intimidated.”  

Not to be outdone, Roll Call Editor-in-Chief Christina Bellantoni and the author of this post (both in the fantasy top 10 ) took to the roof in our 77 K Street NE headquarters to do some peppering.  

Disclosure: The author of this post is a member of the Bad News Babes, the press team.     

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