Game 10 Report - Final Game

Well, last night was the Twins' final game. We were playing the Purple Diamondbacks. In an attempt to get all of the players who had not played pitcher a chance to do so, we were down to each player getting to pitch one batter. Not really, but we did have the catcher and the pitcher switch after one inning. (Seems like our games this year are very, very short. I can remember Luke batting 3 times a game the first year. He has only gotten to bat once each of his last two games.)

Our pitcher/catcher combo for this game was one of our more athletic kids and one who shows up and tries hard, but is one of our youngest and smallest kids. Guess which one got more outs? Yep, the smaller one. In one of those "who knew?" moments, he scoops up the ball and fires a direct throw to first. It wasn't the fastest throw I have ever seen, but it was right on target and our first baseman was able to scoop it up and make the out. He did that twice - one time the first baseman made a great play to keep after it and get the out. I was really glad for the pitcher. Like I say he is smaller than most of the other players - even those his age. His dad helps out coaching and is the most positive coach we have. He even cheers for the other batters. I pretty much left calling plays up to him and his son responded well.

We had a couple of other good defensive plays. Sort of makes you wish you had a few more games since everything was starting to really come together.

Both teams got three outs one inning, but the three they did was really set up by the umpire. Our batter clanked the T so hard the ball jumped out about 6 inches outside of the circle in front of the plate. Everyone sort of sat there since it was technically a foul ball. Everyone except the catcher, who had gone out to get the ball to hand it back to the ump. She suddenly says "run, run..." and he is pretty much standing on home plate with the ball. As soon as she did, you could tell by the look on her face that she knew she had messed up. Our runner on third didn't even have a chance to leave the bag before he was called out. She kind of looked at me with a "I'm sorry" look and I just waved it off. No point in getting worked up with one out left in the season. Some of the parents started to grumble, but I hope when they saw us just blow it off, decided to let it go too.

Our cube player got all the way around to third twice. This is a big deal since I cannot recall him getting to first without being thrown out once this year. (Did I mention he is not the quickest player we have?) He is also the one who ran to third the first game -- from home plate after hitting the ball. Progress!

I would love to show you some celebration pictures of the team with their medals, but our camera goofed up and the files were somehow bad. As Jana says: 100,000 pictures of plants we can recreate but once in a lifetime shots like last game of T-ball and Luke's kindergarten graduation, the camera messes up. We were both pretty sick over it!

After the game the team went to Mr. Gatti's and celebrated a great season. It was sort of bittersweet to think that next year Luke moves to coach pitch, but for now, we will continue to celebrate a great season!