Passed Balls, Bad Calls, and Buckner

The Beave had his second game of the season last night. It was away, against a pretty sizable team. They played two five inning games. The Beave's team was down one of their best players. He plays shortstop and is number two in the batting line up. So the goat was in the visitor's dugout last night.

The Beave is the lead off hitter and gets them going with a triple. (Woo hoo!) Next guy up strikes out. Third to the plate is usually a good hitter, pops it out to right field (sacrifice?) and I'm watching the Beave on third, he waits for the catch, good, coach sends him. Yay, we have our first run! Wait, ump calls him out . . . says he ran too soon. Huh?! I saw the play, and since he's my kid I really watch those things, but oh well, you get your bad calls, suck it up, right?

Next inning we get through our full line up and manage to get up by two, the Beave brings two guys home with a single. Third inning over quickly. Fourth inning Beave hits a single, brought home later with another guy on a single. Now the score is 6-2. Fifth inning over quickly. So that's the first game, not too bad.

The second game our team switches all positions. The Beave leaves shortstop to pitch, regular pitcher takes second, center fielder takes third, third takes short stop. The Beave is a good enough pitcher, he can throw strikes, but he's young and doesn't have the power or speed yet. Defense will have to kick in. I said, defense will have to kick in. I'm looking at the score book and there are a lot of E's there. When you write an E followed by a dash and a number, that let's the person reading this log know that there was an error made allowing the runner to advance, the number shows the player that made the error. My book is loaded with E's! For example, the other team hit a number of fly balls, not one of which was caught. The infield didn't do much better, there were several easy ground outs that were missed by the short stop and second baseman. Our whole fielding looked like a bunch of Buckner's!! Oy! But if our bats had started swinging we could have done something . . . well they weren't swinging (the Beave hit OK) but even with that there were things we missed. The catcher had several passed balls on the third strike and our guys were like, what? I need to run, huh? Oh, well, they will learn. So they lost the second game 1-7. Ouch!