Nationals

I figured I should drop a quick note and blog entry on our trip to Nationals.

Anyway, we had a great draw. We opened Saturday at 1:30 p.m. and just needed to win one game to advance to Sunday, which was our main goal this year. We scored in the top of the first on a homer and things looked good. Then the bottom of the inning came around, we made some mental and physical mistakes and we trailed, 3-1. Things got worse from there.

Final score? 12-1 on the losing end. Ugh. So we have to now wait around all day as our next game is 9 p.m. So some of the guys get into some beer, we ave all day to wait, but we opt to go find a field (which we found) and take some BP. That turned out to be some of the most fun we had all weekend. We all hit, joked, had some fun and loosened up.

Then we played, not until like 9:30 or so, but we played. And what a great game we had. The end result was a 5-4 victory in one of the best games I’ve been involved with in a couple of years.

And we had made it into Sunday!

The game was pretty well-pitched on both sides, we had some great defensive plays and had a couple of clutch hits and some good running to come away with the W. Good times.

Sunday was a bit different.

We played at 10:30 and lost, 9-5. A lot of the runs we alowed were on mental or physical errors and it just didn’t seem like we were all fully into it. Which I can’t seem to understand because it’s a National Tournament. But, it happens. We left runners in scoring position, had a couple of blunders, but shit happens.

A couple of us stuck around for a little bit. Haven’t been able to find any results yet, but one of the other localish teams was doing well. A friend of mine from college also runs a team and they went on an incredible run Sunday and finished like 6-2 in fifth place. Great stuff.

But, we’ll be back next year and hopefully we can have one of those fantastic runs.

“Tough times don’t last, tough teams do.”