A little more softball

There's so much to write about when you have an entire weekend with 15 guys and 4-6 girlfriends/wives traveling together.

The trip down to St. Louis was uneventful, but we arrived at our hotel to awful disappointment. We were staying at a Super 8, which we've stayed at the chain before without a problem, because that's what our sponsor booked. We were welcomed by Najam, the surly Indian counter guy to start off our Super 8 adventure. You weren't going to get much out of this guy that was going to be helpful. After passing: a goncha-smoke-filled stairwell, several seemingly homeless people and sticky carpet (yes, carpet), we made it to our room. As it turns out we had one of the nicer ones and it was pretty awful. I should have taken pictures, but I was too focused on getting us out of that hotel and into a new one.

While it wasn't necessarily "my job" to get us out of there, I think the team manager isn't quite comfortable with how to interact with the sponsor all the time (which I am) so I was on the horn pretty quickly. Since it was already almost 7, we stayed there one night and had reservations at a Holiday Inn Express for the rest of the weekend. Those rooms were palacial in comparison.

As it turns out, this was one of the most important things for the entire weekend as a day long rain delay meant that we were at the hotel most of the day on Saturday. The lounge area off the lobby was often filled with Brewdogs playing cards or some form of drinking game. The swimming pool allowed for a small distraction as well.

Unfortunately, after playing 9 games, I have no idea how well/poorly I hit. Though I hit a few balls hard in the first game, after two games I was only 4 out of 8. Not awful, but not great. If just one of those hard hits got through, I would have been 5-8 and things would be cheery. Well, we'll see how the stats turn out.

Because of the rain and fog delays, in addition to playing all night, Monday's games in the loser's bracket (teams who have lost one game, but not two) were playing what's called "one pitch" rules. It works like this, the pitcher throws the ball and if it's a strike and you don't swing, you're out. If it's a ball, you walk to first. Otherwise you hit it and see what happens. Games under this format go about 25% faster, so they could fit more games in compared to the rules being used in the winner's bracket (which were already playing revised rules to speed up play). The game moves really quickly while you're hitting and that's part of why I don't really remember how well I did personally.

In one of our one pitch games, we faced our local rivalry called "Fury". In the bottom of the second, they were up 10-1 on us having scored 6 and then 4 runs. But we had the best half inning of the weekend in the bottom of the second and batted 16 consecutive batters without making an out and scored 15 runs (I got on twice that inning). We ended up winning 20-10, I believe.

My arm still feels like it's hanging on by a thread, but the rest of my body is relatively pain free. Yay!!