Baseball!

As usual, I played two softball games with my GTA "C" team on Monday night. We were sporting a very nice 0-and-4 record going into tonight. (That's 0 wins and 4 losses.)

Our only pitcher loves to play infield or outfield but since he's all we have, he's had to pitch everything so far. Last week I tried to substitute for him for one inning and I got shelled. I gave up a grand slam home run plus a few extra runs to boot, so that was the end of my pitching relief last week. The opposing team was hitting home runs all night but we kept it pretty close even though we lost in the end.

This week I arrived before almost everyone so I decided to practice pitching a bit before everyone arrived. Last week I tried to throw straight underhand, no spin. That failed miserably, rarely even hitting the plate for a strike. This week I tried a side spin and a backspin and I was nailing both of those.

With those two pitches working, I volunteered and pitched the first game. Beautiful. I didn't walk anyone, I had a couple of strike outs and I got key batters to pop out with my backspin pitch. Combine that with our team's great defense and excellent run support and we came away with our very first win against a team that held a 3-1 record beforehand. The final score was something like 16-4.

I split the pitching duties in the second game with another player who pitched last year. While we limited them to only a few runs, we couldn't get anything going ourselves thanks to their excellent defense and we ended up losing by a couple of runs. In any case, we came away with one win and we've got some confidence going into next week's game. Fun fun!