Game 3 recap

We played Legs of Fury, which is another of the new teams. We scored 7 runs in the first inning and that was pretty much that. Final score, Ninjas win 12-2.

Perhaps the most remarkable event of the evening was the continuing transformation of Scott Jones from wacky coach to motivational, hard-ass, Bill Parcells-type head coach. I mean, one of our players kicked a fly ball that was misplayed by the outfield into a home run to make the score 10-2, and Scott was complaining about it, because we stress kicking ground balls with no runners on base, and the fly ball should have been caught.

And you know what? Scott's absolutely right to do this. We've played three games this season - one game against a veteran team that we lost, and then two against new teams that we won in blow-outs. And frankly, those wins don't count for much. As far as I'm concerned, it's almost like there are two Divisions taking place at the same time. One four-team Division for the good, returning teams (us, Redrum, Valley Girls and Uno Mas) and one five-team Division for everyone else (the four new teams plus the Pregnant Cheerleaders, who are great people, but aren't in the same league as the other returning teams.) Playing these new, weaker teams is only going to reinforce bad habits (going for home runs instead of just worrying about getting on base being a big concern) that is going to come back to haunt us when we play a good team at some point. Those fly ball home runs we kicked last night are only loud outs against teams like Redrum.

In fact, I'm making a prediction that we lose to Redrum in the regular season when we play them next month, based on our schedule. We'll have played two (what should be) easy games, and have had a bye week right before it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see us hitting a lot of fly ball outs in that game, and being surprised that they can catch everything. I'd like to be wrong about this, though.

On a more fun note, Michael and I umped the early game. Michael brought yellow and red cards (actually yellow and pink index cards) that we issued to players for made up infractions during the game. We also ended up giving each other red cards while umping, which was nice.