damomoo

Softball Whores or "We're going to the ship, what?"

We have a name for guys who can't turn down an invitation to play softball, softball whore. My buddy Ray is one as well as Alex. These guys drive up and down the Bay Area anytime they're invited to play. Fortunately, we were able to play all together at the Smash tournament at Twin Creeks in Sunnyvale. This was similar to the Asian tournament I played in a couple weeks ago where we won ZERO games! The Smash tournament was also Asian but you can have 3 non-Asians (that's neat to say, non-Asian, instead of always saying non-white). Our D.O.M team (Dirty Ol' Men) has a majority of Asians so at least for this tourney we were able to bring up the majority of our team, those who had the time. The family came up as well. We encourage all of the families of our D.O.M team to come out and spend time together. Oh yeah, we left the house at about 5:45am. That was tough.
On Saturday we played 3 games. Our first game we ripped the other team. They were big boys, some samoans from Hunter's Point/Bayview, but they were really cool, laughing at each other when they made errors. I took a ball right off of my foot in this game which is still affecting me to this day. I even got a couple of hits which was encouraging since I've been kinda messing around with my swing. The second game we played another team which I kind of sat out. I batted but I also played a little outfield. This was another blow out which is kind of fun since guys get to play other positions than what they're used to. I can still flag down a fly ball or two. The third game I was unable to play in being that it was at 3:00pm and I had to get to Novato for a gig. The guys were going to be playing a tough team so it was tough leaving them like I did. I called them later and found out that the sun was shining so hard that it made it hard to see the ball when you are batting. They ended up winning that game by a decent margin which put us as the 2nd seed in the tourney come Sunday.
On Sunday we had to be there for a 9:00am game. I got home the night before a little after 12am so I got some rest. The family stayed home and then attended parties the whole day and I planned to meet them as soon as we were done. It turned out that we weren't even ready to be done. Our fourth game of the tourney we played a tough team but put them out of reach by the 4th inning. The fifth game was a little tougher against a group of guys who said they came in 2nd last year. They were from Alameda and were good players but we just had the bats rolling up to this point. The sixth game was against the host team of the tournament. They made it this far and were actually ahead of us at one point in the game. It was even getting a little heated with the talking but cooler heads prevailed, they crumbled in the 5th inning and we were setup for the championship game.
In the championship we played a team called Shaka. They were some big boys who had a large following. They were beating their teams left and right by an average of 15 runs a game. We went up 4-0 on them but they answered right back. We kept it close but eventually they pulled ahead at 11-4. They were also hitting the ball up the middle on me and my fellow pitcher Ron who replaced me to mix it up. In softball, although there's no rule of not hitting the pitcher, out of courtesy, we try not to do it. They don't follow that rule. I made a couple of plays on them while pitching but other times the ball is hit just too hard to do anything. All good though. In our last at bat, down 11-4 with 2 outs, we scored 5 runs and brought it to 11-9 with a runner on and our big boy, Jason aka Chief up to try and tie the game. They walked him, kind of an obvious move, but cheap nonetheless and the next guy hit a sharp ground ball that they made a play on to end the game. Although we lost the championship and are bitter knowing we coulda shoulda woulda won the game it was a great time playing 7 games and winning 6 of them. But it sucks knowing the 1 loss is for the championship.

posted by DJ John @ 1:39 PM