We arrive at the clubhouse a bit late today and it was a busy morning with many campers ready to get things rolling for the first day of games. Today we will play games at 9:45am and 1:10pm and play 8 innings in both games.
Frank Viola lets me know that I will be starting in game 1 - so I head off to the training table to get these legs stretched out and also my shoulder all warmed up with some atomic balm (think IcyHot but its a bit more potent than that) so keep that area warm and loose for the game. Our team, Ex-Terminators (Ex-T's) were faced off against a very solid squad in the Dilly Dilly's. They have many good players so I knew I needed to be in top form to win this game.
We get out of the gates fast with a 3 run first inning and get going -- I helped myself out by getting an RBI single as a part of the rally. We head to the top of the 3rd inning and I successfully give up that lead. I was pitching real well up to that point and had a batter with a 2 strike out and came inside with a fastball and hit him on the hip. That loaded the bases - the next batter hit a rocket out to RF and our 70 yr old RF couldn't track it down -- but he made a nice effort and it emptied the bases. We struck for a run in the bot of 3 to make it 4-3 -- added another in the 4th to make 5-3. I struggled in the 5th inning, walking 2 batters, but somehow escaped the inning, went out for the 6th and it was more of the same, my control lost me but again, no runs but not rock solid. Frank Viola decided I had enough so we got our closer, Van Beach, warming up, the inning started with a lefty batter so I came into the 7th inning to face him (and the plan was to get him out) -- and I did, so I was done for the day -- 6 1/3 innings pitched, and 3 runs given up -- all in all, not bad. They hit the ball hard a few times but found our gloves so this game could have gone the other way easily. We gave up one run in the 7th inning for a 5-4 game. I walked to lead off the bottom of the 7th and came around to score on a ground out to make it 6-4. A quite 1-2-3 top of the 8th gave us our first victory of the 2018 camp. A nice win and Beach gets the save. I ended up 1 for 2, 2 runs, RBI, and a walk. So solid all around.
The 2nd game was brutal -- highlighted by lots of walks and just a slow moving game all in all. We scored 5 runs in the 2nd inning and they came back with one run. We were playing the Mombo Lombo Stingers -- they had won earlier in the day, so one of the teams was going to end up being 2-0 for the day. We tacked on 2 runs to extend the lead to 7-1 and another 2 to 9-1. They fought back and got 4 runs over 3 innings to close the gap to 9-5. We scored 2 runs in the top of the 7th to get us back in front to 11-5 -- that was courtesy of my 2 RBI base hit -- I had a nice day at the plate going 3 for 3 in the 2nd game with 3 RBI's. We held them in the 7th and 8th innings to win 11-5. Ugly game, almost took 3 hours to play.
Camp Standings after Day 1:
ReLoads 2-0
Ex-Terminators 2-0
Dilly Dilly's 1-1
OverAchievers 1-1
Lombo's 1-1
Belly Ups 1-1
Last Call 0-2
On the Rox 0-2
The injury report is not official but the Ex-T's did not suffer any notable injuries -- our catcher has a sore hand as a batter hit him in the hand on a follow through but looks like he should be fine which is great as he is our #1 catcher.
We have a great squad - great guys, couldn't be more excited about the rest of the week.
We play 2 tomorrow -- same bad place, same bad time......
~~ "You can observe a lot just by watching." - Yogi Berra ~~
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