9.03.2008

Die another day

… I didn’t feel like playing baseball tonight.

… The day had started with Kates waking me up an hour earlier than my alarm -- because our power was out. The thunder was rumbling outside … Then it took me longer than normal to get Phoebe ready. It seemed like it took an hour alone to feed her this morning, though really it was probably about 20 minutes. And I ended up being about 15 minutes late to work …

Several times throughout the day, as I began thinking about my plans for tonight, I nearly forgot I had a baseball game to play.

But my mood changed when I got to the field. The weather was cool; it was like football weather. A breeze was blowing in from left field, and -- for the first time all season -- we were actually warming up in our warm-up jackets. It felt great!

On top of that, we were starting the playoffs tonight as the No. 6 seed playing the No. 3 seeded Hawks -- a team that we haven’t exactly been fond of this summer. We hated the way they carried themselves, we‘d lost three games to them this season, and they enticed one of our top pitchers from last year to move to their side during the offseason. So there was a certain fire in our eyes, a revenge factor raging tonight when we took the field …

From the start, we were super aggressive on the base paths and used some good base running to take an early 1-0 lead …

Then in the top of the second inning, I came to the plate and hit a two-out single to the right side. I stole second a couple pitches into the next at-bat … And that batter shot a fly ball toward center field. I could tell off the bat it was going to be shallow, but with two outs I was off and running. I got an excellent jump and by the time I got to third base, the base coach was waving me toward home -- the ball had dropped. I crossed home plate standing up, gave us a 2-0 lead, and was pretty proud of my base running during that sequence …

… But the Hawks came back and tied the score in the third … And it stayed tied until the eighth inning.

In the meantime, I struck out after battling and fouling off a handful of pitches in the fifth inning. The umpire called me out on a ball that I thought was far outside. … In the seventh inning, I took a hack at the first pitch I saw and flied out to right field.

In the eighth inning, we went to work on the Hawks pitcher. We’d been making him work all night long, and he was finally showing signs of being tired. We stayed aggressive on the base paths, rattled ‘em and scored three runs to take a 5-2 lead. Our dugout was roaring

But in the bottom of the inning, they started getting on our pitcher too … And when we finally stopped the bleeding, they had taken a 6-5 lead.

So we went to the bottom of the ninth. Three outs to work with … Tom led off the inning and lined a shot to left field that dropped for a single, but with the game on the line, he got a little too aggressive and tried to stretch the hit into a double -- and was tagged out … I couldn’t blame him for the move, but it didn’t go our way and we feared it would cost us …

But Lance walked, Ange was hit by a pitch, and then I stepped to the plate again. I got a walk, too, and suddenly the bases were loaded with one out …

Lo and behold, Kyle stepped up and got a hold of one. He roped it down the third base line and the umpire called it a fair ball (which was a much-welcomed call since we thought we were the victims of a bad call on an almost identical play an inning earlier). The two runners ahead of me scored, and I slid safely into third base to beat the tag there. I was left stranded there, but it didn’t matter -- we were ahead 7-6 going into the bottom of the ninth …

And we sent them down 1-2-3.

The way we hopped onto the field afterward, you might have thought we won the championship. Truth was we just really wanted to win that game …

Making it even sweeter, it was a total team effort. Everybody on our team contributed tonight, everybody did what they needed to do …

It was easily the most gratifying, dramatic and fun game we’ve played in our three years of playing together.

We've lived to play another day ...

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