Us Guys 7 Royals 6

Despite our best efforts of getting to the ballpark early for some batting practice and a good warm-up, we still couldn't escape the clutches of our early inning mistakes.

I managed to get out of work early to sort out a water bottle and a few other things before heading over to the diamond. I managed to get there before the 5pm meeting time, sorted Alan out, since he left his gear in the back of my car and went for some batting practice.

Everything felt pretty good... the arms were loose, in the cage felt fine, all the tweaks and sore spots were alright and the nerves were pretty calm. Maybe that was because of a little Hooch & Cranberry.

All those who showed up, showed up on time last night. We were stretching on the diamond come 5:45pm... a good 45 minutes before game time. Everyone seemed pretty relaxed and pumped up at the same time, so you know, it was looking good.

Play ball!

The first inning jitters came to fruition with an error in the field which cost a first inning run against. Since we were the home team, we batted second and responded. Munden hit a second or third pitch homer to start the inning and Alan crushed one over the right-centre fence to take a 2-1 lead.

The second inning really knocked us on our ass. A sharply hit ball to right field dropped in front of Josh and took a funny hop between his body and arm, which led to a 2-run inside the park homer... which was really a single with both runners scoring on the error. I think the Us Guys managed to score 2 more in the inning to take a 5-2 lead.

As most of our games have gone this season, we were caught behind the 8-ball early. Another fairly common occurance is that most of the runs in our games come in the early innings.

The bottom half of the second inning, we chipped away 2 more runs against their lead. We held them in the third and we scored another 1 to tie the game. They managed to chip away single runs in the fourth and the fifth inning and we could only rescue one more run in the bottom half of the sixth inning, which obviously wasn't enough.



Errors were the most noticable mistakes in our game last night, but there was some coaching decisions that a couple of us felt were a little odd. The coach's son, Ryan, was icing his arm in between innings and complaining most bitterly about starting in left field. Sadly, as the coach's son, he got moved into third base and Nick came out in favour of Dave. Nick, a decent fielder if he's in the game, was pretty healthy and not having a bad game, but he was the one that got benched instead of the injured player. There was also one other incident even with myself, with Munden on base and I being next up to bat, I didn't get the normal signal to bunt when it was an obvious time to bunt... instead found myself striking out, 'cuz I was swinging away. Even Rollie said to me after the game, I should have been bunting a lot more, even just to get on.

So, that was the game in a nutshell... I went 0-for-3, a groundout, 2 K's and a walk. I also had one error in the field myself. A slow roller to second and I was playing pretty deep for the out. I ran in, picked it up in stride and failed to connect with the underhand throw to Aaron. I'm not too sure if I could have actually got him, but it didn't look or feel too good to throw it away.

Game 2 goes tonight at 6:30pm, Diamond 3 at Shouldice Park. Should be a gooder.

Mom and Dad came out to watch last night. Dad was the one taking the pictures for me on the camera. He got quite a few, which was really cool. Jen didn't make it out, but by the sounds of things, she'll be coming out with Sarah tonight, so that'll be really cool. I'm gonna give Ashley a call when I go for lunch and see if she'll come out... not pinning many hopes on it, but it'll probably mean great things if she does.

Today at work, I'm gonna clean up this stupid trouble client I hope. They're just continually surprising me with all their changes and needs and complaints and such. I'll have to file another small one for them this afternoon, which'll be fun. I hope I get that filing early enough so I can take off at 4pm. Bastards. Otherwise, I have a few filings that are due in the next couple days, rather than today, that I'll work on. Might as well get them off my desk so I don't have to worry about them at all.

Well, I'm gonna sign off...