Bring on the Baseball (part 2)

On Sunday, the Dodgers had another game - this time against the Braves.  There were a lot of shady dealings with this game.  First, they had a sub on their team.  Apparently subs are allowed, but the sub was the best player in the league (and everyone knows it).  Then the ump made one really bad call, that our coach tried to challenge.  The ump just ignored him.  Meanwhile, the home plate ump apparently told one of our parents that he had a good view of the play and that if our coach had challenged it, he would have ruled in our favor - our coach DID try to challenge, but the other ump just ignored him.  This game really did not go in our favor.  By the 3rd inning (about 40 minutes into the game), the Braves were up 13-2, and the ump called the game - basically pulled the mercy rule.  Sigh.  The kids really had a hard time with this one - they just couldn't understand why they weren't even being given a chance to catch up.  It was hard.  Once again, Zachary hit the ball really well - one line drive that rolled all the way to the fence, and a rocket of a fly ball.  He just got unlucky, and was thrown out at 2nd on his first hit, and his 2nd one was caught.  It just seems that the other teams are really good at exploiting every opportunity that they can, while our kids are playing a little more tentative.  Hopefully they'll get a fire underneath them soon.

Liam's team had a scrimmage on Sunday too, against the Giants.  They wore uniforms, and played as if it were a real game - there were just no umps.  The head of the 4/5 year old league decided that they would go ahead & coach-pitch to the kids, instead of defaulting to the tee.  I was surprised at how many kids were hitting the pitches!  Liam went out with lazy swings, and had to have the tee each time he hit.  It was kind of sad, because Josh had told me that he had hit some of the pitches in practice.  It missed the end of the game, because I had to get Zachary over to his game, but it looked like they were doing pretty well - as well as you can expect 4/5 year olds to play.

On Monday, we had the 3rd game in 3 days.  We were wondering all day if they'd get the chance to play, because the weather just looked dicey all day.  But we got word that the fields would be open and game would be played, so we headed to the park and got ready to play.  Dodgers vs Giants - the Giants hit first.  They scored 2 runs, but then the Dodgers got 3 outs, so they got ready to hit.  We had 3 batters hit before the rain came.  Everyone huddled under the dugouts while we waited to see if the rain would pass.  After about 5 minutes, it let up a bit, and so the coaches & umps decided to resume play.  Just as our next batter was about to hit, the tornado sirens went off.  Great.  Being in the middle of a baseball field is exactly the place you want to be when tornado sirens are going off.  At that point, the umps called the game, and headed home.  A few minutes later, the sirens stopped, and the rain had stopped, and the kids didn't understand why we couldn't re-start the game.  As we were walking back to the car, the sirens started back up.  We finally got loaded into the car and headed home.  The weather took a nasty turn as we got closer to the house - we hit a wall of rain, and it started to hail.  It was kind of scary that we had been out on the field only about 20 minutes earlier.  So now they have played 3 games, and have 2 that need to be made up.  Zachary is supposed to have 2 more games before the weekend, so we'll see what the weather holds.