I can handle Clackamas Community College’s struggling baseball team. I can live with the fact that — mathematically at this point — the Cougars are on pace to win a meek six games this season.

I can handle the fact that the team ranks 22 in HR, 23 in batting average and leads the league in most errors committed, but what I could not handle in game two of a four game series against Chemeketa on April 12 was Chemeketa’s rally cry of “We will score.”

It’s not that they had just beat the living piss out of the Cougars 10-0. It’s not that the Cougars dropped their twelfth straight. It’s simply the fact that it was the single stupidest smack talk attempt I’d ever heard at a college baseball game and I had to listen to it 52 times over the seven-inning game.

For Christ’s sake, you’re a college athlete and the most clever heckling you can come up with is “We will score?.”

I know college athletes tend to miss class because of games, but exactly how much of Writing 121 do you have to miss to be as unclever to constantly yell “We will score” every time the game gives pause to allow the chatter from dugouts?

I’ve heard nasty chatter before, like “Stick it in there and make a baby” (from a Linn-Benton’s shortstop last year urging his pitcher to get a strikeout.) Even though it’s not quite appropriate, at least it was clever and a wee-bit funny.

The constant yell of “We will score” might be worse for baseball than the 1919 World Series, the designated hitter, night games, the steroid era and instant replay all in one.

Baseball prides itself as a thinking man’s game, and “We will score” is the equivalent to stating “We play baseball.”

Chemeketa congratulations on the wins this weekend, but I hope next time you come to our campus your players have missed fewer English classes, or at least enrolled in Smack Talk 101, because your dugout chatter skills are not on a college level.