SoftBalling.com

We shouldn’t be surprised anymore, I suppose. Sparkle Motion stormed the field and left TopCo senseless in an 8:30 romp. Final score was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 – 2.

This is the team with the really big dude pitcher and some chirpy but harmless musclehead infielders.  They’re fast and athletic, just not particularly good at softball. Well, I take that back. The right-center fielder (brunette in the light blue shirt) made several tricky snowcone catches.

Highlights from the game included Emilie and Lancy’s big hits, a few 3rd base ropes from Aunt Mimiand a rocket from Gary that scored a few in the top of the 6th. Wednesday was also the Skokie league debut for Christine’s Matt, who held his own at SS and hit 7th.  I walked twice knocked a feeble grounder through the infield.  Fielding was good, especially on a 3 man relay that kept a sure fire home run to a triple and John Evans pitched another excellent game.

Looking forward to next week against Prairie Fire when Southern Hemisphere Matt may make his return.

Guess these guys weren’t that good after all.

We’ve definitely lost to them in the past but we came together and spanked an old rival. Newcomer John Evans pitched a shutout into the 7th inning as Sparkle Motion took the game by a final score of 4-1.

Fielding is improving in the outfield and infield. Still no Don (shoulder) but we did get Molly Jones into action.

Next week is Topco.

So yeah, not so good for a first game of the season. 

The weather was warm and the sky was clear but Sparkle Motion made its debut in the Skokie Softball league with a dud, dropping its first game to Jerry’s Nuggets by slaughter in the 6th. Final score, 13-2. 

The game featured some good pitching by new team member John Evans but we had few offensive opportunities, more than a few fly balls over outfielders heads and several infielder juggles, all of which contributed to the loss. 

Afterwards, “offseason rust” was officially blamed and all confidence has been restored for next week against Swingin’ Shillelaghs.

And as for them, if they doesn’t make you embarrassed to be Irish, I don’t think anything can.

Well, then! It appears the weather will not stop us from getting the season underway tonight.

We face off against another old foe, Jerry’s Nuggets. This team has alternated between average and world beaters. You never know which team you’re going to get so we should prepare for the best version and roll with it if they fail to come to play.

Even though the season hasn’t started, we’re feeling the sting of the injury bug. Lancy and Don are both nursing sore shoulders and are not expected to play.

Never fear though, as Elisabeth (who previously disclosed that schoolwork would prevent her from participating in the summer league) has said she’ll be able to join us for tonight. With her, Eve, Christine, Emilie and Molly (maybe??) we should be good for the evening.

As for guys, we have Paul, Gary, Lee, John and me. Perhaps more if someone calls Sean or Zack.

Ok, sponsor talk: We’ve made pre-preliminary arrangements with Paddy Mac’s again but we need to show some support after the game. This week’s game is early (6:30) so if you can stop by for a beer or soda and some nachos, it’ll go a long way towards convincing them to pay our team’s fees. Just remember that Eve laid out the league fees out of her own pocket so we need to make sure she gets that money back.

that is all for now. I’ll be taking some photos but probably no video of tonight. Until later, go Sparkle Motion!!

Well, it’s early on Wednesday but the odds do not look good.

“And I wonder, still I wonder…… who’ll stop the rain?”

To be honest, I’d prefer not to start the season against these lamos. What we need is a warm up game against St. Peters or some team of that caliber. Not world beaters but someone to remind us that we need to turn it on. I guess time will tell if we get this 9:30 game in. If not, that’s just one more game where we’ll have Don (and possibly Matt) back in the lineup.

Boo to the first game of the year being cancelled due to rain.

We were set to get the 2009 season started against Just One More, who some of you may remember from years passed.  If I’m not mistaken, this is old man river’s team with some uppity players. We’ve beaten them a couple times and they’ve beaten us a couple times. Usually a good game so I’m looking forward to our reschedule.

Next week, we have a 9:30 game against Ski Unit. For those who don’t know, they’re young(er than us, anyway), fast, brash and feature a goofy dude in short shorts and a turtleneck wearing PAB.  That said, they’re pretty good and whenever we’ve beaten them, we snuck up on them with big runs early and put the pressure on them to keep up. Obviously a big test for so soon in the season but we’ll take it as a good measuring stick for what kind of shape we’re in. Let’s hope we spank em.

In terms of our games tonight, I’m offering these thoughts.

1) We just played TopCo last week and beat them. We didn’t beat them by much but also didn’t play amazingly either. While we can’t let them hang with us, I don’t see too much problem sending them home for the winter.

2) Our second game would be against arch-rival 1st place Ski Unit. We all know how lame these guys are, despite being young and fairly good. We hung with them last game (we were winning for a while) but we caved somewhere around the 4th and the floodgates just opened. Here are my comments from right after the game.

Unfortunately, we got slammed, 9-2. We were winning 1-0, they tied it at 1, we went up 2-1, then they went up 3-2. In the last two innings, they poured in 6 unanswered runs and we all went home very grumpy.

The good: We scored our runs being aggressive; Sean and Lee both scored on sacrifice flies from Second base and went home on overthrows. That’s the kind of thing winning teams do. We also played well defensively. Molly and Sean made very good throws on the infield and Don and Lee had good plays in the outfield. I don’t believe they hit anything too monumental far.

The bad: Walks were still a big deal. I’m guessing here but probably four or five of their runs walked their way onto the bases. We did a little throwing the ball around defensively also but, more than anything, lack of hits. I didn’t keep track but I think we may have had 4 hits on the night and maybe two walks of our own. they scored almost double our total baserunners, which is obviously no recipe for success.

Bottom line now is we need to win the rest of our three games to go .500 and have a chance at playing in the playoffs.

The good news is they’re all highly irascible and will fold like lawn chairs if we jump out to a lead. I’ll also add that we didn’t have Paul, Matt or Elisabeth for that game, which obviously left us a bit exposed. Not so for tonight.

After we take care of Ski Unit, we play the winner of the 50/50 and Paine/Wetzel game. We lost both of these games early in the season when we played at 9:30 without Molly and frankly, I still had a partially torn hammie. I’m feeling pretty damn good now so I see a clear path towards glory.

Lastly, if anyone is looking for inspiration, here’s the thread from the day after last year’s team won the championship.

http://softballing.com/bbs/index.php?topic=135.0

If you see the picture about halfway down, you’ll see a lot of those faces look familiar. We are the team that won last year by taking down the first place team 18-2.

In fact, with Molly and Elisabeth, I think you’d have to argue that we’ve improved personnel-wise since last year. We’re healthy, are obviously capable because we did it last year against several of the same teams (TopCo, Paine-Wetzel, etc) and we beat the best to be the best. We just have to do that a couple more times tonight and we bring home more hardware for our trophy cases.

let’s go BB!

ok, so we’re not off to a screaming hot start but we’re not totally lost either.

For game one vs. Jerry’s Nuggets, we let a team playing with 9 (just ok) players stay in the game until the 5th. We then threw a couple crooked numbers up two innings in a row and made what had been a close game into a laugher victory. The game was played 5 guys and 5 girls, with Shawn McGivern filling in capably for Don and Paul. No pics or video from this game unfortunately.

Last night vs. Paine Wetzel, we fell victim to a patient team of hitters (they must have walked a 5 or 6 times, easy) and big boppers doing what they’re supposed to. I can’t recall someone hitting 3 home runs against us but their number three batter did just that. It started with a solo shot and ended with two devastating grand slams. Those runs pretty much put the game out of reach, even though it wasn’t so poorly played. We had a couple pop ups and a few strikeouts but did score 9 or 10 so offense wasn’t really the problem. What makes this worse we beat this team HANDILY last year. Oh well…. Don and Miles shared a batting spot, Erin filled in for Christine and there are a few pics and video that I’ll post this week.

On to next week, which is a later game, if I’m not mistaken. I’ll write up something about them when I post the pics/vids.

Ok, so a lot has changed since I last updated.  Previous to now, the latest post concerned a double header of makeup games against Team Beinveste (which we won) and Head First (which we almost won). I had been very excited for these games, as it seemed we were playing our best softball at just the right time, gearing up for the playoffs and making a run for the elusive summer league championship the following week.

Of course, things don’t always go as planned. As it turns out, I (miles) suffered a rather demoralizing (for myself, not the team) leg injury during the first half of the double header and was too frustrated to update the page with a post game breakdown or to upload the pics/video from those games or from the first round loss to Jerry’s Nuggets.  It’s a shame because I took many good pictures during those games and I will try to sort through the footage I have and post them in the appropriate places.

On to the present though, as tonight is the scheduled start of the Fall 2008 Skokie League. After much discussion about abandoning Skokie for a city league, we find ourselves once again back on the North Shore to defend our Fall 2007 championship victory (as Spawn of Belvedere).  The whole gang is pretty much back, although Don (who injured his shoulder late in the summer season) and I are still on the mend from softball pains and Paul is trying to shake off the effects of a recent car accident (thanks again to the drunken illegal who u-turned into Erin’s car on Labor Day!).

Shawn McGivern will suit up for us tonight in a rematch against Jerry’s Nuggets, who eliminated the 3 Seashells just a little over a month ago. That is, of course, if the threatening rainstorm doesn’t postpone it.

Regarding our team name, we have officially decided on Balki’s Ballers for this fall in an homage to the perfectly hilarious, Chicago based 80s sitcom, Perfect Strangers.

In other news, Balki’s Ballers will be sponsored by Paddy Mac’s, which is where we tried to get sponsored in the summer but it fell through.

Game time tonight is 6:30, and the lineup is as follows.

Lee (LCF)
Eve (1B)
Matt (RCF)
Elisabeth (LF)
Sean (SS)
Emilie (C)
Gary (P)
Christine (RF)
Miles (3B)
Lancy (2B)

Sitting: Paul (car accident related) and Don (shoulder)

How strange is it that the two rainout games were against the worst team and arguably the best team in the league? Up first is Team Beinveste, who sport a record of 1-6 with 18 runs scored versus 78 runs against. Both stats are absolute worst in the league. Game starts at 7 and I don’t believe we’ve played a team with this name before.

The second game is against Head First, who comes in with a record of 6-0-1 (pending last week’s regularly scheduled game vs. Ski Unit and a makeup game versus Shillelaghs) with 88 runs scored and 14 against. For comparisons sake, The Shells have scored 71 and let up 31. Other than the 11 we gave up in our stinker loss to Shillelaghs, we’ve given up 20. They’ve been even a little better than that.

The attendees of Saturday’s practice discussed a little strategy/gamesmanship for tonight’s game. Since we play the last place team while our next opponent is in the stands watching, we figured we’d mix it up a little bit in game 1 to maintain our powerful element of surprise (namely, lots of lefty hitters and strong fielders at key positions).

If Head First has a weak fielder (and I’m not sure they do. I’ve seen them and they’re very solid, especially on the infield and in LF), it’s probably going to be in RF. If we can jump on them with a bunch of long hits to RF in the early innings, preferably in the 1st inning, we can probably scratch across a few runs that might be harder to come by in the later innings after they adjust to the big swinging lefties. Putting a good team at an early deficit monumentally inflates the pressure they feel, especially if they’re not accustomed to trailing.

With this in mind, I think we need to load the righties in the top of the order for game 1 and lefties in the top of the order for game 2. Lee, Miles, Don and Paul. Hopefully, the surprise of right field hits will let us jump ahead quickly and push the game out of reach before they adjust and move a stronger fielder to RF. I’m even considering (and I’d ask the other lefties, if they’re brave enough and we’re winning by enough) hitting right handed in my last couple at-bats of game 1.

Ok, that’s it. long pre-game post… Let’s get these games on.