On A Roll

I played two games with my slo-pitch softball team again last night, as I usually do on Monday evenings. As I mentioned before, our team won our first game last week so we came into the evening sporting a shiny 1-5 record. According to our league's website, the team we were playing had an 0-6 (pronounced "oh and six") record so we liked our chances.

I ended up pitching both games thanks to my surprise prowess on the mound, such as it is. In our first game we were the home team and we came up in the bottom of the fifth inning for the last at-bat of the game. We were losing 2-4 and we were having a tough time generating any offense. Apparently we had finally gotten warmed up, though, as we proceeded to bat in three runs with only one out and then the game was called as we won 5-4.

The second game was even better. We had worked out the kinks and we had very few errors in the second game, improving on the first defensively. In line with that, some of our fielders had fantastic plays during the course of the game. We declared Vicky, who was playing left field, the star of the game thanks to two gorgeous catches that would have ended up as doubles or triples. On one play, she was running backwards to catch a high fly ball that was hit quite well. She reached back over her left shoulder and caught the ball, but then the ball popped out of her glove not just once but twice. She kept running with it and finally managed to pull in the catch. I bowed my cap to her for that spectaular sequence.

We also kept our momentum going from the first game and we had hot bats right from the start. I pitched pretty well, using the setting sun behind me to my advantage to blind a couple of batters into strike outs. The game ended 9-0 for us, so our team managed to get a shut out. That's pretty impressive in slo-pitch, though we need to give credit to the fact the wind was blowing pretty hard all evening towards home plate so no one could hit anything very far in the air without the ball getting pushed back quite a bit.

Enough about baseball. I had one unrelated link to offer. [CAUTION: Don't read the following if you dislike violence.] Apparently there's a custom of some kind in South Korea and in Japan in which people cut off their little fingers. The trick is that it means different things in each country. This blogger tries to get to the bottom of this cultural difference.