This weekend was our first softball tournament of the year with my new team which is a combination of our old team and another team. The tournament was in St. Louis at fields which I've played on before and really enjoyed. The league is USSSA, which is also my favorite league, so it was shaping up to be a great weekend. The tournament had 11 teams and was going to be a one day event, which meant a lot of softball.
Unfortunately, with the combination of teams and my advanced age, I'm not guaranteed as much playing time as I would like. I'm not sure what that will mean for the rest of the year, but we'll see how it goes. For this tournament, we had 14 guys and I was told I would be playing a lot of third base. It turned out that I played much more than I think the team manager wanted me to play due to injuries. We had two outfielders and a middle infielder go down (strained quad, strained t-band/groin, and food poisoning of all things) which led to shuffling of people around, so I ended up at third for 4 of the five games.
My pinched nerve didn't have much impact on my playing except that my left arm got tired as the day went on (my tricep still isn't up to snuff yet). We won the first three games 9-1, 8-0 and 14-6. The games were pretty low scoring due to the type of ball and the relative humidity in St. Louis. Unfortunately we lost the next two games against inferior opponents (the two injuries came midway through our third game) 6-5 and 9-8. Yours truly made the last out of the day with the tying run on third base. Ugh. The inning started with the first two guys getting on and then the next two guys made outs, so while I was the last out, I was by no means the only person to not come through that game. Next time!! All in all, we hit lousy as a team and I was no exception. The first two games I was at least .500, but after that it was pretty miserable.
On to pictures!
I told my college roommate, Springfield Sam, that I was going to be coming through town around dinner time if he was free. His whole family was and me found a nice place to eat with a fish fry (it is Lent after all) that was close to the highway called Dublin Pub. It was a great choice! Here's Sam, his wife Diane and his three kids. The place had something called a "horseshoe" which is bread topped with your choice of meat, then slathered in your choice of cheese. They also have pony shoes which are just smaller versions. I went with the all-you-can-eat walleye fish fry though and sweet potato fries. Yum. Nice job Sam! Great to see you guys too!
I told my college roommate, Springfield Sam, that I was going to be coming through town around dinner time if he was free. His whole family was and me found a nice place to eat with a fish fry (it is Lent after all) that was close to the highway called Dublin Pub. It was a great choice! Here's Sam, his wife Diane and his three kids. The place had something called a "horseshoe" which is bread topped with your choice of meat, then slathered in your choice of cheese. They also have pony shoes which are just smaller versions. I went with the all-you-can-eat walleye fish fry though and sweet potato fries. Yum. Nice job Sam! Great to see you guys too!
For my birthday, we got a small group together to go to Sapori Trattoria, our favorite Italian restaurant. They always treat us very nice there and gave us this semi-private room. Naperville Greg and Kleveland Kim are on the left of the picture and Ricardo and Jodi are the right. We had a great meal and good times.
In addition to a free assortment of desserts, the private room and honoring a coupon I forgot to bring, they put my name on the menu!! Very nice.
On the Friday before St. Paddy's Day, we went to Emmit's Pub for the fish fry and some good drinks. Though it's not a fascinating picture by any stretch, I wanted a visual memory of the delicious, delicious fish. Yum.
One of the cool things about Emmit's is that they periodically and randomly have bagpipers show up! Lots of Irish fun!!
3 comments:
Glad you got to play ball and your pinched nerve didn't get in the way of it.
Looks like you had some good eatin' over the weekend too! We went to an all-you-can-eat fish fry at a local restaurant on Friday. The fish wasn't great but we were with fun friends, so I count it as a successful evening.
I'm glad you were able to play and not have any more injury issues!
Happy birthday old man :)
at your age it's lucky they don't get a wheelchair when they see you heading out for the field :)
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