Five hours of baseball

It was one of those rush around late afternoons, having left work early so I could get the girls fed before a 6pm softball game and still have Darby at the field in time for warm-ups. The first tournament game was tonight, on the heels of yesterday's win, so the team was pretty excited. Darby had a couple of good hits, BUT nearly lost the game for the team on two occasions. It's a little unfair to make such a statement, but the facts are compelling. I had a discussion with Darby about it, hoping it came across as a lesson rather than ridicule.

Ahead by one run, with two outs, a grounder was hit to Darby's position, but instead of throwing the ball to first (as she had been told to do) for the third out and to conclude the inning, she threw it home to beat the runner heading in. That would have been fine, but the catcher missed the ball (a regular occurrence and thereby predictable), so the runner scored, while the runner on first was safe and also later scored. By the time the inning was over Darby's team was losing by a run instead of the other way around.

Later on in the nail-biter, the team tied it up again, and there was a winning run coming into home when... Darby got in the way of the runner, who was then tagged out before she reached home. Darby was on deck and a little anxious to get out there. She stepped up to the batter's box before the play was over and in the process kept her team from scoring and winning. She actually had done that twice in two innings so the umpire even had a talk with her about it. At that point it was into extra innings and that half a second delay created by Darby stepping into the runner's path extended the game many more minutes. Fortunately for Darby, she and the game were saved by the last minute heroics of her teammates. One of the newer girls on the team hit a nice one to shallow center, allowing our runner on second to get home to score the winning run (though not before a dramatic fall and slow recovery after rounding third). Holy cow, it was our second straight win, something not done before by this team.

Immediately after Darby's game, the girls and I headed to Bricktown for the RedHawks season opener. We missed the first two innings, but we got our money's worth in the end. The game went into extra innings and the RedHawks won it in style with a bottom-of-eleventh homer. The girls had a great time at the new ballpark playground built in the off-season (though it was clearly inundated with children), and they also enjoyed the fireworks after the game. What was not enjoyable was the hellatious traffic trying to get out of Bricktown on a Friday night after a home-opener near-attendance-record-setting game. I think we were sitting still for longer than it took us to get home once we broke free of the traffic. Plus it was late (after 11), and we found out after Darby's softball game that we have our next game at nine in the morning. That ought to be... adventurous.