Unfortunately, I slept very, very poorly on Friday night(because of the loss, to which I contributed) and getting up early on Saturday didn't help. We got beat pretty bad on Saturday morning, 21-9, to a team (Fury) that we usually beat under different rules (homeruns and type of ball being used mostly). So it SEEMS like our tournament would be over, but no! This particular tournament holds a mini-tournament on Sunday for D teams that went 0-2 or 1-2 (due to the possibility of playing much higher level teams both games). On the line? A World Series birth (in Sterling Heights Michigan, not the Super World Series in Disney)
The tournament today was single elimination at started at 10. Fortunately that allowed me to get plenty of sleep after taking two hour long naps during the day on Saturday. Mind you, all three days had games down in Joliet, so I had to drive the 50-60 miles each day. This year, more than past seasons, things like sleep, alcohol, eating right and minor injuries have more of an impact on my game than they have in the past. Getting old is a bitch, but it beats the alternative.
The rules changed for our tournament on Sunday, back to the normal rules we play by (one hour run only and a much more "dead" ball). So we won our first game 14-13 in extra innings, coming from behind to tie it. In game two against Road Dawgs, we pretty much dominated in a 10-4 win. Road Dawgs had beaten Fury 8-5 in their first game. So you can see that the rules altered Fury's scoring from 21 runs to 5. Much, much different. In our final game, we hit a two run home run in the top of the seventh to take a one run lead 8-7. After recording the first two outs in the bottom of the seventh on outstanding plays by our shortstop, our usually very reliable pitcher lost it a bit and badly walked two batters. He was tiring. The next batter hit a ball into the hole between myself and the shortstop, so I headed to the bag at third after realizing I couldn't get the ball. The shortstop dove, grabbed the ball, it squirted out of his glove, he grabbed it barehanded and threw the ball into the dirt to me at third. I scooped it out and recorded the final out. We won!!!
So we've gained a birth into the World Series and we'll have a great chance to qualify again for the Super WS in Disney. Sunday I reversed my bad fielding and had a pretty good day at third....in fact I don't think I made an error. Hitting-wise I think I ended up about .500 on Sunday. Unfortunately I was 2-6 on Friday and Saturday. Not awful, but not great.
And here's the team!! We only take a team photo if we win or do really well, so it's nice to be lining up again.
3 comments:
Congrats on the win! From your posts it sounds like the season has been a little rough for you so far so it's nice to have a good game in there. ;)
You're absolutely right Stef. Not sure why, but we've really struggled this year to stack several wins together. It was nice to get three in a row.
Great description of the play! I felt I was listening to play-by-play on the radio. Glad you got the good outcome.
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