The big day finally showed up, and man oh man was I e'er-pumped. Knew going into it that the first two games of the day would be Keith's Schrute Hucks and Eric/Katherine's Plastic Hurling Phenomenon. Big games stood in our way. But first let's set the scene...
(Prelude 1 - I stupidly played softball on Friday night. The whole thing was going fine - I played infield (third base) and was intentionally taking it easy, saving my juice for the next day. This actually resulted in a ridiculous 8-9 day, all doubles and triples. Wahoo, I am a line drive machine. But then in the second game the ump made a terrible call1, one that ended up costing us the game. But we all got fired up, and so when someone tried to take 3rd on a hit to left-center and the throw came into me, I chased her back to second and laid out to tag her. Sweet, yes, but my arms were skinned, too. And my quad got reaggravated. Stupid, stupid me.
But smart, smart me - after Beck and I had a late dinner at the surprisingly passable Chuy's (not the Texas version), we came home to watch some Weeds episodes. I iced my quad something fierce, and it seems like it helped a ton. Yay us.
The real point of this prelude, though, is that after Weeds, when Beck had fallen asleep on the couch and I was finish ing up my third 20 minutes of icing, I lazily clicked through the channels and saw JAMES BROWN LIVE on the Late Show with David Letterman. Okay, it wasn't JB, it was "The All-Stars" or some such, a James Brown tribute band. But UH-Good God Y'all-Can't pass the people can't pass the HIT ME if that's not a sign I don't know what is - a prelude of FUNK for the fnuk).
(Prelude 2 - woke up Saturday morning and watched those Ulti-videos I posted yesterday for pump-up effect. They worked mightily. Also jammed out an acoustic version of Paradise City the likes of which the world has never seen. Yeah. Pre-game pump up! I've been doing this crap since 1991. Let it be known that G'N'R's "Don't Damn Me" worked excellently back in the day of Hobby basketball games. Let it also be known that this is something of a shoutout to Mike NTPB for his birthday, as he will undoubtedly remember this. I followed this up with a healthy dose of Parliament and then some GPGDS on the car trip there. Made my usual ritual stop at the grocery store, loaded up on NSAIDs, and I was good to go).
Showed up early to help set fields and check out the early games. There had been some lighting problems on Thursday night, so those teams showed up at 11 and played half-games instead. I said hey to Jessa and Marisa and encouraged them to beat Mamba and make it to the semis. Chatted with some folks who are new to the area (I met a nice lady named Melissa who was out there with her very little baby; she just moved here from New Hampshire and wanted to check out League). The games themselves were a relatively pointless exercise; other than some classic VOTS sloppiness and a couple of horrendous, make you want to cry for the guy gacks by Byron, they were pretty uneventful. Both higher seeds won anyways, so nothing changed dramatically. Those teams did have a built in excuse should they lose later in the day, though, so that was sub-ideal. Just a slew of crappy things that were outside of everyone's control - more on that in another post, but Jose did an admirable job keeping things together. As for the actual field-setting, due to a lack of space the fields were pretty skinny, unfortunately - skinny fields lend themselves to playing zone, something that is not necessarily a weakness of ours, but certainly not a strength. So I was not thrilled about that, but whatcha gonna do.
Justin showed up early along with Ben, and we hung out a bit before game time and took some warmup laps. Let me just put out there that Justin in THE MAN. He's take-home-to-your-daughter nice, and just a phenomenal, FAST player. Got him in the fourth round on a steal (and a bit of a tip from Eric), and wow was he HUGE. ANyways, he again brought his boom box, and this time Wade (eventually - both he and Pat showed up late for our first game, what the hell?) brought a generator so we were set for all day fnuk tunes. Yeeha. Quad felt reasonable if not great, and game time rolled around so here we go...
First game of the day was against Keith's Schrute Hucks. Keith told me before the game he thought the spread should be 12 (in a game to 13, yikes) - they were missing their 1st, 2nd and 4th round draft picks, a pretty big blow to a team that had struggled a bit during the regular season anyways. This was a pretty unbalanced game on paper, and it ended up being pretty much exactly that - we ran out to a big lead on some hucks and disc control, and they just couldn't keep up.
To be perfectly honest, we played fine on D, but after getting up big (7-2?) we got really, really sloppy on O. A little bit of playing down to the other team's level, but it's something that gets me crazy - I would much rather just run over a team in super efficient boring fashion and be done with it. We got it together again and ended up winning 13-6; this was a very ho-hum game, but just enough to make me uneasy about the next one. We had gotten our juices flowing and the kinks out of our system, though, so that was cool.
The following showdown game vs. Eric/Katherine's team was big. We both smoked our first (really, second) round games and elected to play a little early at 11:40. We lost the toss - something we had not done all season but then did in all three pool play games, yikes - and Eric, being not-an-idiot, elected to pull to us to start the game. They shot it to us, and on the first couple of points I hit people deep for scores; this had huckfest written all over it. They returned a couple, and at 2-2 it was seemingly on.
Seemingly. Our D was really, really good, and forced them into a goofy situation of almost exclusively throwing between Rob, Eric, Chris and Tom - they also had a new woman who caught a few scores in impressive fashion. But they relied a lot on hucks, and not just hucks - really high-precision-requiring hucks to the back corner or trying to hit guys with lasers. Just a lot of low percentage throws that did not often work for them - felt like they were swinging for the fences every time out. Justin matched up on Rob and they more or less equaled one another; Pat took Eric a fair amount, and we otherwise just matched up well. After some minor D adjustments and our usual crispy offense, we started to pull away. They semi-shockingly threw zone against us only on one point - Wade absolutely shredded it with a big flick, we scored, and they just gave up on it. After that, it became a game of efficiency; they kept taking precision shots deep that didn't connect, and we took much higher percentage shots that did. Good game, but we ended up winning 13-7.
A side note: many, many props to Eric. There was a point where he cut and I tried to move over into position and cut off his route but really just ended up colliding with him. I thought he would call a foul but he didn't, just let it play on. And then about a minute later, we had the disc back, I laid out for a pass and he kind of clipped me from behind in the legs. I was going to just let it go, but he called foul on himself. That's a really hard thing to do in a fiery competitive game, and I admired it big time. This was another in a series of tense games that didn't get nasty. They played well, but I think we had just a hair too much handling for them and a lot of their high risk dice rolls didn't pay out.
So pool play finished, and it was on to the semis. Black Mamba, the one seed from Tuesday, was missing more or less everybody - their men played savage all day, and they only had three women. So unsurprisingly, Multiple Scoregasms beat them to win their pool. This set up the semis as a rematch of our game from last Thursday, a game we had won 15-11 but had been mightily tested in. So it looked to be a good matchup...
1 Runner on first, one out, batter hits a line drive to short, short drops it pretty blatantly intentionally to try to turn two, but the ump calls a dead ball. And then... he calls both batters safe. Because that somehow makes sense in commander cuckoo bananas land. So, the relevant rule is 6.05 (l) if you care to look it up, but it plainly states that a batter is out when a fielder intentionally drops a line drive in order to make a double play. The ump refused to reverse his call or even look at a rule book. The next batter flied out, and then they proceeded to score 8 runs on a variety of ridiculousness. None of which would have scored had that aforementioned fly out been the third out. Which, you know, IT WAS. Ugh.
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