Weekend in Rockford.....not quite like Manilow's Weekend in New England

Many of my fine, fine readers are going to be on vacation and away from their computers for the holiday (or at least they won't want to check up on my blog if the MAN isn't paying them to do so), so I'll save some of my better topics for Monday/Tuesday ("That's gold Jerry! Gold!!)".

Last night I saw about 60 seconds of Snakes on a Plane and that's all it took for me to realize that this is possibly the worst movie ever made outside of India (they make some bad stuff there). The snakes were just getting out of whatever they were in on the plane and killing people left and right. One woman saw someone get killed or was disturbed by the plane going down at a rapid pace and reached for the air sickness bag (while people are dying left and right and the plane is going down....by all means, let's be neat about your vomit), opened her mouth to be sick and a snake in the bag (that she's holding mind you) jumped out and bit her in the mouth. You've got to be kidding me. You're not going to notice that a snake is in the air sickness bag??

Today I woke up at 4:30 a.m., not by choice though. I wasn't supposed to get up until almost 6, but something woke me up and I couldn't get back to sleep. Fortunately I only had a 90 minute drive to Rockford and a softball tournament to play. Ugh. Imagine the shock of the Starbucks baristas when I showed up at 6:15 a.m.! They guessed that I was going golfing, but a softball tournament was the second choice.

Our first game was at 9 a.m., but we had to check in at 8 and warm up with some batting practice. We played a team from Iowa called Henry's Tap and won 10-9 in a come-from-behind seventh inning victory. At about 2 p.m., we played the state champs from the tournament a few weeks ago where we got our butts kicked, Aurora Turners. After only pinch hitting in the first game, I played shortstop in this game and played pretty well. We won 11-6.

As you know about the level of softball in which my team plays, there are restrictive home run rules. In this organization, if you hit a home run, not only is it an out, but every time thereafter that your position in the batting order comes up (regardless of whether you are in the lineup or not) it's an automatic out. In the game against Aurora Turners, one of our outfielders hit a home run in the first inning and we had to fight through the automatic out in the lineup. Mind you, the fences are 300 feet, that's a football field, so it's not that hard to keep the ball in the park.

One more game today and it started around 5:30 p.m. against a team called Infinity. I was moved over to third for this game and made about six or seven putouts including a diving stab. A quick reminder that for the last few weeks I've been struggling with my at bats, but I felt like I figured it out this week and did better in the game against Turners. So in this game I came up to bat in the top of the seventh and last inning. We had started the inning with a hit, then an out, then a walk and then an out. So with two outs, runners on first and second and us ahead 5-3 (having not scored a run since the second inning), my at bat was going to be a huge momentum at bat. I took a ball and then laced a foul down the first base line that would have been a double if fair. Damn. But I dug in and ripped a single to left scoring the guy on second and then the guy from first as the ball skipped away from the left fielder!! I ended up on second and the team was jacked up. The next five guys got hits and we scored four more runs to take an 11-3 lead into the bottom of the seventh where Infinity went quietly. Whoo-hoo!! We went 3-0 on day one and head back tomorrow for some more. Here's the link if you want to follow along on our progress.