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!