Playoffs vs Red Sox

Again sorry for the delay. This is the first of several end of season/after season posts. I hope to do the rest tomorrow, though it might not formally conclude until Monday. I am doing this all from memory, so I don’t have tons of specifics, but you should get a pretty good feel for what happened.

Steve and I had announced the day before that Percy would be our pitcher. This was after he had a terrible showing, as we wanted to express our support for him. After thinking it over, we decided that since games go 6 innings in the playoffs that we would go Percy, Avi, Everett, Everett, Trey Trey. The idea being get our weaker pitchers out of the way early and close out strong. When we played the BoSox the previous week, having Trey available at the end of the game was crucial towards producing our tie (and moral victory).

So it’s a Wednesday night and we are expecting the full team. Steve and I arrive to the field early, though not excruciatingly early. The team starts to arrive, but very very slowly. Enough that I start to get worried. I get more worried when somebody tells me Percy had injured his foot at school. However, I know they’re super responsible about calling so they would call.

Fortunately, the game before us runs late as we only have 9 players show up right at game time. Kelvin, after being bitched out a couple of times about not calling us if he was going to be late, does call and say he’s going to be late. Percy shows up and we are told he was doing dry heaves in the car on the way over. So injured and sick. What a combo. I believe, but am not sure, that all our players do end up showing up. Ethan might not have.

Anyway, we give an extended pregame speech. About playing hard. Doing the little things. Relaxing out there and playing as well as we know that they can. I feel good as we go out there. We lose the flip so we’re up to bat first. And their pitcher, the kid who we had coached last year , basically blows right by us. We might have had a hit, but we get nothing going.

So Percy is sent up to the mound. And, well, it’s painful. He has no control just like he hadn’t the night before. He throws walks. He gets hit. He gets hit some more. And he throws some more pitches which are balls. After his third walk I go up there and basically say “I don’t care how you throw it, just throw it over the plate.” No dice. He walks the next batter and we’re forced to auto yank him. In comes Bobby. He starts off poorly, but in the end gets us out of the inning, though after allowing three walks himself. After the third walk I went back to the mound and gave him a similar speech to Percy, and said that I know if he takes something off of it he can get the ball over. So he did, and got us out of the inning. It was bad, because as I was walking away the other coach thought that was 4 walks and we had to switch again. But fortunately that was not the case and so the inning ends and we’re down 5 or 6 to nothing.

Next inning we once again fail to get any offense going. Up comes Avi, and they just rock him. We let up 7 runs and only get out of the inning because of the cap on how many runs a team can score in an inning.

Through-out the game, it should be noted, our defense didn’t help things out. It wasn’t exactly that they were playing poorly, it’s just that that they weren’t playing well. So with the pitchers pitching so poorly, having a mediocre didn’t really help.

Third inning new pitcher, new hope. Except that this guy is clearly their ace. Completely overpowering. In his two innings of pitching we had exactly two players make contact with the ball. Like even for foul balls. It was not good. So we don’t score in either of this innings.

But at least we have some hope when Everett comes in to pitch. At least our bad pitchers are over with. Except that Everett isn’t throwing well. Fortunately they only manage a couple of runs before Everett pulls it together and gets us out of the inning. As mentioned earlier, our second inning against their ace isn’t better then the first. The good thing is that we get to the top of the order for the new pitcher in the 5th. Everett pitches very well in the bottom of the 4th and doesn’t let up any more runs.

The bad thing is that when we enter the 5th is that we need to score runs. The game is currently 13-0. Which means that if we don’t score 6 or 7 runs the game is over as we would be mathematically incapable of catching up in the 6th. We get a little bit of a rally going, but can only scare up 2 runs and so the game is over: 13-2. We were crushed.

Our team spirit was pretty good throughout the game, which was good. But our batting was not. Our pitching was not. Nor was our fielding anything to write home about. There were not really any positives I could take out of the game.

The situation only gets worse. We already knew that Ethan wasn’t going to be there on Saturday. Then I learn that Fuller is not going to be there on Saturday. As we’re leaving the field Trey and his father come up to me. Trey had asked before the game started about when he was pitching. We explained we wanted to save him for the end since it was a six inning game and that he should pitch. I honestly didn’t anticipate being so far behind that we wouldn’t play either the 5th or the 6th. Trey mopes away. Trey’s father then lets me know that Trey has front row tickets to the Cubs/Sox game on Saturday and since we lost that he will likely not be at the game. He says he will call me on Friday to confirm one way or the other, but that we should plan on not having Trey.

And so my despair only deepens. The next day I get a call from Jim’s mother who is very concerned that we won’t have enough players for Saturday’s game. By our count we’re sitting exactly at 9. Anyhow she is very sweet and offers to have some of JS’s friends come if need be. It was very nice. She ended up talking to both Steve and I, and while I forget the details of it, she talked to Steve after she talked to me and Steve completely rocked the conversation. On Friday I get the phone call confirming that there will be no Trey.

Saturday morning I wake up ridiculously early, despite the fact that I had been up pretty late the night before with friends. I am NOT looking forward to this game. We are going to play the Angels, who if you recall beat us pretty soundly earlier in the season. And we’re going to do it without our star pitcher. But the good news is that when I wake up it’s raining oh so lightly. I like rain. As a pick me upper, I make one of the Cinnabuns I had in the freezer and it works some to cheer me up, not to mention letting me have enough calories and fat for the rest of the day. At 7:15 I call the weather hotline and get an update that the games are postponed, but picture day is on. A real decision will be made at 9 o’clock regarding the games.

At 9 o’clock the games are canceled. I am secretly very happy. Steve and I can’t decode the message to figure out if they’re going to reschedule the games and squash them into Sunday or just cancel the playoffs. I head over to his house well before picture time anyway so we can make up team awards. It is his birthday and so I give him his present, a copy of Moneyball. At this point Steve’s mother insists on making him pancakes, just like she used to do when Steve and I had sleepovers. We go and make the awards and then I get to have my second breakfast of the morning. We eat, print out the awards, and head over to the rec center to have our team picture.

At the rec center it’s an absolute mess. There are no Park District employees anywhere. There are teams everywhere. It’s nuts. We have about half the team show up for the photo. We hear that our game has been rescheduled to the next day. This gives Steve mixed emotions. He’s glad we get to play again, but not as glad that it will limit his ability to go to bars that night for his birthday. As we are walking out to the parking lot and talking about the team, Steve tells me that wants to do it again next year. This is a big relief. I honestly thought he had tuned out the team, with us doing so bad, and was sick of the commute down to the suburbs form the city three times a week. Anyhow, it’s a big relief to know that I will be able to do this again next spring with Steve.

Bobby had suggested that we go out to breakfast and so 5 players plus me and Steve head over to breakfast. It was a great breakfast. Avi makes me sad as he proves again how distrustful he is of everyone when he orders the French Toast, I tell him it’s good, and he doesn’t believe that I’ve ever had it before. Steve backs me up and he believes it, but it makes me sort of sad to see him go through life thinking so suspiciously of others. During breakfast, Bobby confides in us that we’re his favorite coaches ever since we’re the first coaches who haven’t just stuck him in the outfield all the time. Knowing what Bobby’s athletic ability was when I was student teaching at his school, I can understand how that was true that his previous coaches had done that, but it was still a great thing to hear.

Steve and I head back to his house and find out that when they rescheduled the games, they redid the brackets. Instead of playing the Angels, we’re playing the Braves We’re very excited about that. We make some phone calls and then head down into the city to hang out at his apartment for a while.

After a depressing week with baseball, knowing that we’re going to have Trey and we’re going to be playing a team that is very beatable, gives me a lot of hope.