Game #5

Played another baseball game tonight.

I’m getting really sick of telling people how talented of a team we have and then having to admit we lost another game and that we’ve yet to win one this season …

We took on the best team in the league tonight, our second meeting with them this summer. The first time around, they beat us pretty handily … Tonight’score, however, a 20-9 loss, hardly represents how closely-fought this game was … well, how closely-fought two-thirds of the game was.

Playing as the home team tonight, we gave up two runs in the top of the first, and came right back with two of our own in the bottom half. Then we gave up three runs in the top of the second and came right back with two more in the bottom of the inning …

Offensively, we’d jumped out to one of our best starts of the season. We were playing good defense, guys were upbeat and we had a sense we were going to get our first win, while handing these guys their first loss …

Then we fell apart.

One of our team leaders and best pitchers twisted his knee rounding second base; he’ll be out for at least a couple weeks. Our middle infielders were botching just about every ball hit to them. And before we knew it the other guys had put up a six-run inning, and then followed that with an eight-run inning …

We did mount a minor comeback in our final at-bats, though. We put up five runs in the final inning before one of our runners was picked off of first base for the final out -- with me at the plate.

Grrrrrr.

I led off the lineup again and started in left field tonight. I had been seeing the ball pretty well all night, in addition to wearing out the opposing pitcher … In my first at-bat I worked the count to 2-2 and fouled off a couple pitches before slapping a line drive single to right field. I had a similar at-bat in the second inning, fouling off pitches and getting the count full before taking a walk. In my third at bat, I worked the count full again, fouled off some pitches and then grounded out to short when the pitcher tried to get me on an off-speed pitch. And finally that fourth at-bat -- runners on first and third, I fouled off the first pitch and was brimming with confidence that I could knock in another run for us …

But it wasn’t meant to be …

Kind of like a lot of things about tonight’s game …

At least we played. The threat of severe storms hung over the city all afternoon. Then at about 4:30, about an hour before game time, the sky let loose. Still, we prepped the field, took it on time and played through a steady, soft rain for much of the game …

By the final innings, we were on our fourth-string pitcher and had made several defensive switches to try to stop the bleeding in the infield. I took over at second base with the bases loaded. The rain continued to fall, but the sun started to shine, and a rainbow appeared in the sky parallel to first base.

“You see the rainbow?” the runner on second base asked me between pitches.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe it’s a sign … A sign for us to quit for the night and go home. A sign that there‘ll be better days.”

As for the other games ...
Game one: We lost, 16-4
Game two: We lost, 13-2
Game three: We lost, I was off for the weekend
Game four: We lost, 5-4

My line so far ...
.333 avg., three hits, three walks, .500 ob%, one strikeout, three runs scored and an RBI.