Stayin' Alive

Well you can tell by the way I use my walk I'm a woman's man. No time to talk. Music loud..

Sorry about that. Anyway, the point of the title is my softball team is barely alive in the playoff tournament. Now I already posted the deal with the brackets. Safe to say in our rematch against the navy blue team (Brommel), we got kicked in the teeth. They scored in 5 different innings and we just could not get a rally together. The wind was blowing out and we had trouble dealing with that too. And our infield defense was beyond bad. I think for every ground ball play they fielded correctly in that game, they missed four. We lost 8-2. I went 1-for-2 with a single, walk, and ground out. I made 3 catches including 2 tough ones in the seventh. That said, we had a rookie umpire who had no idea what he was doing. Many of his ball/strike calls were borderline, not to mention inconsistent. He didn't know certain rules. He was brutal and he played some role in us losing.

So we had an hour off and as pissed as we were, we needed it. Fortunately, the team we were going to play in the first game of the loser's bracket didn't have enough players so they forfeited. We got an automatic win. The we played a team from the B league. They only had 9 players, so they had to play with 3 outfielders instead of 4. And they really had no power hitting, speed, and not much defensive ability. They jumped out to a 5-0 lead on us thanks to more bad defense and some inaccurate pitching. It took 7 batters for us to record an out, a fly ball to me. We scored 1 in the 2nd and in the 3rd, I walked to load the bases with nobody out. So our 2, 3, and 4 hitters are up. Foulout, pop out, flyout. End of inning. No runs.

I was feeling confident but that inning took something out of me. I was worried. But things started to happen. With two runners on, Cliff (a new guy who looks just like Ozzie Guillen) tripled to right. On that play, their right fielder (also their leadoff guy) popped a hamstring and they had no subs. So they moved him to second base while their original second baseman went to right field. Problem was the new RF had just arm surgery and couldn't throw at all. So everything just turned in our favor. We came back with 3 in the 4th, 3 in the 5th (though I did leave the bases loaded with a popout), and 6 in the 6th. We allowed 2 more runs along the way and 2 more in the seventh to get out of there with a 13-9 win. To be honest, we were lucky.

I went 0 for 2 with 2 walks and a run scored and made 4 or 5 more catches in shallow center field. There was a play where they had a runner on first and two outs. Guy hits a ground ball up the middle and I fielded it. I tried to get the force at second but I knew it would be a tight play. I didn't have time to wind up and throw, so I just whipped my hand back and pushed the ball out. The second baseman scooped it out of the dirt just in time. It was ugly, but it got the job done. And these guys are used to seeing me play great defense so they were laughing at me about it.

So I think we need to win 3 more games to win the title. And in our next elimination game, guess who we play. That's right, the navy blue team that has beaten us 2 weeks in a row. So we have a little revenge to get on them. They're a pretty cocky group with a few guys that like to talk smack so I really want to knock them right on their ass.

Of course, we play at 9 am and I'll be in Baltimore this weekend. My flight is scheduled to get to Chicago at 8:30. Which means I will have to do some serious rushing to get to the field on time. We'll see what happens.