um, Tricksters could win the tourney!

That's right, folks. The Bloomington, Illinois Co-Rec B Tricksters were forced to forfeit the first game of the tournament last week because so many of their players were out of town and yet, theoretically, we could win it all next week. Here's how it went down.

Our first game at 7:00: the other team didn't show up, so we won by forfeit. We took the field and did some batting practice and goofed around some, which was lots of fun, and I think we got a lot of our errors out of our system before playing the green team.

We were the away team, so we were up first, and we scored 6 runs in the first inning. Excellent start, Smithers. For most of the game we were ahead. And then we had the requisite meltdown inning, where the other team pulled ahead of us by one run. It was painful. Painful, I tell you. But then next inning we tied up, 12-12. Our last ups, we scored two runs, making it 14-12. And then, my friends, we held them. We held them despite the very large men who hit the ball very very far. They scored nada. Oh, and did I mention that we were one person short, so every time the invisible player was up at bat, it was an automatic out? Imagine what we could've done with all of our players there.

My favorite favorite moment of the night: During our meltdown inning, when the other team had scored probably four runs and we still hadn't gotten anyone out, Julie Wonka, who plays catcher, calls a time out and walks over to Bill, our pitcher, to conference with him. She looks all serious, with her sleeves rolled up to reveal her muscles and a very serious, non-Wonka look on her face. They chat for a minute, she nods her head and goes back to her position. We get three outs fairly quickly after that.

Over beers after the game Julie tells us that she was dying to go talk to Bill just to give the other team something to think about. See, they'd been quite a rowdy team all night. Lots of cheering, lots of shouting, lots of hoopla. And when they got all those runs with no outs, Julie knew she had to do something to calm them down a little. So she walks over to Bill and says, "I just wanna give them something to think about. Make it look like we're talking strategy here."

And it worked. It was a beautifully rhetorical softball moment.