Some call it “huss”, some call it dedication, others just refer to it as stupidity. Who slides in beer league softball? Well, Berto does, and the picture above proves it. He tells me this is a picture of his knee, I’ll just take his word for it. This is the result of him sliding not once, but twice. To his credit, they weren’t bad slides. And with the final result of the game, nobody else is complaining either. We were able pull of the victory with clutch hitting, and some nice defense.
To start off the game, the umpire searched our dugout without a warrant, I think Berto & Dan were strip searched, then Mike was interogated and for what you ask… Beer in the dugout. Last week we couldn’t play music during the game and this week they wouldn’t let us have a cooler of beer in the dugout. I guess impairing your judgement and slowing your reactions is not a good thing for beer league softball.
Once again we had a couple new faces. The girls on our team decided we are too much of an embarassment for them to show up. With Ashley being the only girl from our team, we had to borrow a few players from the team that beat us in the first week. Yup, the gully members from AOK were gracious enough to play for us, actually we forced Tiffany, Renee, Jess, & Sarah to play. Also Mike finally took a night off from traveling for work, to come out. After he got away with leading off in the first inning and once he figured out some of the rules, he turned out to be a real asset. Mr. Jung played well on the hot corner, making a couple tough plays. Berto threw a runner out at the plate and we caught a few fly balls. Dan and Ashley played solid in the middle, Brian & Jess were errorless in the outfield and Tiffany caught everything thrown her way at first. Renee hit the ball well, but I think the umpires were holding her responsible for the beer or something, because they kept making bad calls against her. If it weren’t for a few walks given up by the pitcher (not to mention names, but it was me), then we would have held them to a lot less runs. They really only had 1 big inning, but we were able to get a couple runs almost every inning and had a big inning exactly when we needed it. The score was tied and it was getting close to the time limit so we knew that the top of the sixth would be our last atbat and we needed a couple runs, then to defend our lead. Brian and Sarah came up to bat and put a couple hits together to give us baserunners, then we just continued to hit the ball and doubled our run total (kinda). We batted around that inning and scored 6 runs. Giving us a pretty comfortable lead going into the bottom of the 6th. We haven’t had the lead many times, but we’d been in this same situation a week ago. We were ahead and had to defend it in the last inning, last time it didn’t go our way.
So here’s were the controversy comes in. After both teams agreed that we were tied 7-7 before the inning, we batted around and scored 6 more runs, then as we take the field, their “score keeper”, I use that term loosly, claims that the score is 10-7. He somehow missed 2 of the runs we had just scored and then took away a run from the 3rd inning. So after debating with an older guy that napped the first half of the game, the umpire takes his side. Now to be honest, noone on our team kept the score that inning, but it was me that hit a triple and scored on a basehit that they weren’t counting, so I’d think I’d know what was going on. We cleaned up the score book the next inning and are sure that we were right. But the umpire took their side since they won the coin toss and were home team (yes you heard that right, a coin toss determines how many runs you’re allowed to say you have). So we took the field with a 7 6 run lead 12-6. We held them to a couple runs and got them to fly out to close the game. So we didn’t have many friends after the game, but we won and that was all that mattered.
UPDATE (09/29/08): New picture that you can actually see. Only bad thing is, this is after it has healed for 4 days now. Ouch! Should be fun to watch him run next week.