Tuesday, April 24, 2007

You gotta dance with the one that brought ya

So the one gimme on the schedule was today. We were playing the one team in the league that has won 4 games in the last 3 years.

Unfortunately, it was a last-minute reschedule of a reschedule and a Tuesday. That meant many of my girls had scheduled things for that day. In addition to having no sophomores, I lost my starting pitcher to a driver's license test, my starting center fielder to French tutoring, my starting right fielder to cello lessons and my starting left fielder to voice lessons.

In fact, only 9 girls showed up for the bus today.

Therefore, everyone played the whole game.

I started my 3rd string pitcher and all freshmen in the outfield. My 3rd basemen was a converted outfielder and my 2nd baseman was the one that made so many errors yesterday.

Our opponents weren't good. The 2nd and 3rd basemen couldn't stop a ground ball during infield practice. The outfielders didn't catch a single pop-up. They did have an accurate pitcher who threw strikes, but not very hard.

I was feeling good.

We went 1-2-3 in the first inning. In the first inning we gave up 3 runs because my pitcher stopped pitching and started thinking. The next couple of innings we gave up a few runs, but scored a couple ourselves. We were in this game. By the 4th, my pitcher was out of gas and had given up her 7th run. I had to do something, so I called on my best player, my starting catcher, to pitch. She never pitches, but she knows the mechanics. She came in and got the final outs.

Entering the 6th, we were down 7-2. However, we had seen the pitcher several times and the girls were hitting. Through a combination of errors and hits, we scored 4 runs. Now, we needed 3 outs to get around to our final at bat. The girls were feeling great, they were saying things like, "No runs! Keep thinking! Get dirty!"

Then my 4th string pitcher hit the wall. She couldn't find the strike zone. She immediately walked the bases loaded. Then a girl hit the ball to my 3rd basemen, who was a freshman pressed into service from right field because I needed bodies. She flubbed it. It just went downhill from there. They scored 11 in that inning.

I felt so helpless, but I had nothing else. I just had to dance with the ones that brought me.

We lost 18-6. However, I wasn't as upset as I was yesterday. We didn't have the skills or the practice for the game today. One can't expect to win in the situation we were in.

We are now 0-6 with no chance of winning our two games next week. We will finish winless this season. I'm still processing that.

|