Saturday, January 14, 2017

For The Love Of Softball

Yes, another softball tournament is underway and yes, it is still getting better and more fun. So far today we played six games. The first three were round robin games that only count in terms of placing us in a seeding order for the actual tournament. We finished 2-1 in round robin which gave us the 5th seed, a great place to start a tournament.

Alas, my Friday night and Saturday afternoon teams are not taking the field this season. I have feelers out for Friday night with a few teams and for Saturday I will likely wake early to play in the seniors pick-up game. It is the winter season so some teams do take the season off, so it is not too much of a surprise, but I shall miss it especially now when I have too much time on my hands and really need more exercise. I will just have to actually do exercise then, m'ok?

Ah, the subtle obvious inspires another smile, laugh, and giggling groan. A griggle, in technical terms.

Anyway, we played a local team for the first round robin game and won big, though the scores and summaries (or details, for that matter) are not maintained online and memory is not specific enough to recall everything. I believe the final was 13-1 or 13-0. The second round robin game was against the winners of the Ft. Lauderdale tournament and we beat them 6-2. The third round robin game was a loss by a run or two, I believe 10-8, though most of the runs were on errors due to players out of position. We finished round robin with the 5th seed overall.

Unfortunately, we get a poor turnout for our local Orlando tournament because it is the same weekend as the biggest tournament of the year (sometimes attracting even more teams than the league World Series which has more prestige, but strict qualification rules). Many of us keep suggesting we change the weekend of our tournament, but the tournament director does not want to do that.

Anyway, we moved into tournament play seeded 5th, which is a very good place to be. It means we likely will be home team for most of the tournament until we meet one of the top four seeds. Seeding doesn't say much about the strength of a team as many teams do not play their best players a lot during the roubd robin both the rest them and also to give the players who usually sub more playing time. We let our subs play, but we all play as we had 12 players so all 12 bat and we alternate in the field. As I said, he reason we lost the third round robin game is we had players out of position and they made errors giving up 8 runs. The important thing is they got to play.

We went 3-0 for the tournament so far, stepping up to play big when we needed it. I forget the first couple of games for now, but we had to play teams that did well in previous tournaments. One of the most recent tournaments was in Ft Lauderdale and we had to beat the winner of that tournament in our second tournament game. We won by one run. Our third tournament game was against a travel team (travel teams are usually very good as they spend a lot of money travelling to tournaments and play a lot of softball, so they know tournament rules, tricks, pressures, and generally have an advantage of experience and better player selection). We beat them by a run as well which surprised most of the teams out there.

Tomorrow we will play the second play Ft. Lauderdale team to try to get into the winner's bracket final. We might see either of those tough teams again win or lose the first game tomorrow as they are both still in it.

So sleep now and dream of softball.

Narf :)

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