Blog: Articles filed under baseball

I biked to work today even though it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, what with having a sunburn and no sunscreen. But it worked. So I worked for five hours, then biked home and relaxed until we went to another baseball game.

Everything started well. Cody Allen hit a home run in the second inning, much to the cheers of the crowd. Unfortunately as the game progressed Mankato snuck in a three-run homer to tie us 5-5. Several pitching changes and an infield game of musical chairs for Mankato to cover an injury slowed down the game in the last innings. It all came down to this: bottom of the ninth, one man on base, two outs, and Joey Lieberman up to bat. Would he make the cut?

Well, of course, he’s Joey! At first it looks like he’ll strike out, but suddenly the ball comes cleanly off his bat. Nothing fancy, just a deep hit to the outfield, enough that Marcus Jones can score from first base to win the game! Now that’s baseball.

Incidentally, I got a photo taken of Slugger and I. You can also check it out on my Flickr account. I decided to give Flickr a try—not sure if I’ll stick with it or how much I’ll use it, but we’ll see.

You must be getting tired of my recounts of baseball games by now. I’ll say this, however: it was a great game. Final score 5-0 for our team, and everything was fun to watch. Our fielding was much improved; I‘m particularly impressed with Oney Guillen, the second baseman. In the first few games, he tripped and fumbled and dropped and let things by that he should have easily fielded. He seemed on the ball tonight (pun intended).

I even managed to remember my camera and take some photos of the team and such. I’ll try and take more over the season. My dad and I are even contemplating a road trip to go watch some of the Border Cats’ away games later this season.

My French oral presentation went…okay. I could have done better, but I think I did reasonably well. Now I just have to finish that essay. Then I have no more work to do in my classes (except a culminating activity in chemistry maybe). Eight days.

Went to the first Border Cats home game tonight. It was…not what I had expected. Everything started great, but things quickly went downhill. We had reasonable pitching but some poor fielding, and worst of all, no offence whatsoever—I think we got about one or two hits. By the bottom of the sixth, the score was 8-0 in favour of the Rochester Honkers. It was getting cold and late, so my dad and I left.

Eleven days left. I finished my oral report for French—I present on Friday, second last—and now I want to make a PowerPoint presentation to go with it (in fact I’ll probably use OpenOffice.org Impress, because it impresses me so much ) for visual aids. This report is the oral component of my exam! Then I have to write an essay; I hope to start that tomorrow and get a good thesis and introduction down.

Woo hoo!

We won! It was an amazing game, but yes, the short term would be “we are the champions.”

They scored no runs until the last half of the game, where they unfortunately tied with us, 3-3. Everyone on the team was playing excellently (there were some errors, but no more than usual). Justin Bach played third base since Joey Lieberman had departed, and he was surprisingly good for a change, he even got a hit at one at bat.

First base had some troubles (literally). It was damaged somehow early during the game, and they spent a few minutes trying to fix a bent peg or something. They replaced the base and play continued, but it was stopped again a little while later to fix the base or adjust it or something.

That wasn’t the only difficulty. The umpires made another stupid call, even worse than the third base one. They called a Mallards runner safe, claiming Shaun Williams’ foot was off the bag, when it was clearly on the bag! Our coach appealed it, but to no avail.

Our players are so civil, though. There was one player on the Mallards who had to be restrained by his team mates to prevent him from going after the umpire after a called third strike. None of our players so much as tossed their helmet into the ground. Lots of broken bats though.

The Mallards played well and were truly worthy opponents. When we were tied up at the top of the eighth, I was worried we‘d go into extra innings. A nice walked-in run helped give us the edge for the top of the ninth.

Shaun Williams was on base (first base in fact) at the end of the eighth. Instead of letting another pitcher take a batter or two in the ninth, he went into the dugout, pulled on his cap and glove, and went onto the pitcher’s mound to go into the game cold, after standing on base! Absolutely amazing. And he pitched better than yesterday. Not as many strikeouts, but still an unbelievable arm!

Those guys are going to get so wasted tonight/this morning … well, they deserve it. They are the champions. And I hope those who can come back next year do so, because I’d love to see them again.

The Border Cats and their reign of victory continues.

Although we lost the first of the three games, we have the home field advantage so we played the next one here. And we were awesome! Robbie Johns scored two home runs in two consecutive innings (one home run per inning)! It was amazing.

High scoring game (8-5) but we managed to keep them from scoring in the latter half. Shaun Williams came in to finish off the top of the 9th. I will say this for the Mallards: they belong in the championships for a reason. While Williams smoked three consecutive batters on Thursday, he struggled slightly on Saturday, allowing two batters on base but finally striking out the third.

The fans were on their feet during that inning, and the tension was palpable with each pitch. They didn’t even bother announcing Williams was going to pitch, the fans knew who he was (and if they didn’t, their friends would tell them). Williams was pumped—he only took about fifteen minutes to warm up after the bottom of the seventh when he last was at bat.

As a side note, my brother won “Guess the Attendance” and got a deck of Northwoods League playing cards (the attendance was 3103, the bleachers and entire stadium were packed).

So now we have to play game 3 tomorrow, at our stadium. I’m hoping that a combination of confidence from this game and the power of thousands of fans cheering them on will lead the Border Cats to their first ever championship win! And if not … well, we came this far, the best we’ve ever done. And it was an awesome thing to see.

My hands hurt and my voice is hoarse from clapping and shouting.

The Thunder Bay Border Cats have won the Northwoods Northern Division Playoffs! So this means we‘re going up against the Madison Mallards for the title of League Champions. I’m confident we can beat them (although not necessarily that we will beat them).

Tonight’s game was absolutely amazing. St. Cloud scored in the first inning, but then we scored two runs at the bottom of the first and duplicated this feat in the second. Our players made some amazing plays. Don’t even get me started about the umpiring… .

Take, for example, the bottom of the seventh. Slide into third base, safe by a mile, and the third-base umpire calls it so. But the River Bats coach comes out and starts arguing, claiming that our man was out. Soon enough, all six of the umpires are conferencing and they reverse the call. I mean, really! So our coach argues with them more, and meanwhile the River Bats coach should be tossed for the way he’s arguing with those umpires. The entire stadium of loyal fans shouted “Safe! Safe!” but apparently it didn’t do any good. Our man was out.

Kudos to Shawn Williams (pitcher/catcher/first baseman extraordinaire) and J.R. Voyles (pitcher turned second baseman playing shortstop) for their excellent plays to end off so many innings. Robbie Johns, our catcher, was as usual excellent. Shawn Williams was pumped to pitch the ninth inning, so much so that he striked out all three batters consecutively!

So they’ll be playing in Madison tomorrow (good luck, guys!) then back here on Saturday to play game 2 of the 3 game championship series. I know I’ll be watching.

Go cats go!

All right, I’m not usually this excited about sporting events. But having your own college league baseball team in your city is pretty cool. Watching them win is even better.

So the Border Cats are going to the playoffs! Won their spot tonight in a game of 8-3; they’ll be facing off in a best-2-of-3 series against last half’s winner, St. Cloud River Bats. I’m confident they’ll win against St. Cloud and will go on to play against the South Division winners (most likely the Madison Mallards).

It was the last regular season game I’ll see. There’s one more tomorrow, which will be a tribute night to Robbie Johns, number 23, our catcher. He’s been with the team (in various positions) for all three of its years here in Thunder Bay and is a great catcher and strong hitter. They’ll be retiring his number. I wish you the best of luck, Robbie.

I won’t be able to attend the game, unfortunately, because I’m going to see a performance of The Taming of the Shrew with some friends.

Well, tonight (actually last night, since I’m writing this at 4:18 AM) proves that there’s not really such a thing as a bad night at the ballpark.

It was raining, but I still had a very good time. Our team got off to a very good start: the pitcher kept the other team off the bases, and our batting order was quite strong. To that end, I saw two home runs for our team (one of which brought home three). Up until now, all the home runs were on away games or home games I didn’t see.

We were up 13 at the bottom of the 7th. Now, at this point, we did not have to worry about many things. So the coach let one of the pitchers bat. He struck out, but it was cool to see him bat anyway, and he got to play right field in the 9th; another pitcher tried his luck at the bottom of the 8th and also struck out. You know your team is confident when they let the pitchers start to bat!

Speaking of pitching, for the ninth inning we let our second baseman pitch. He’s a great contact hitter (seldom strikes out, lots of fly balls though), excellent fielder, and apparently used to be a pitcher four years ago. He did pretty well in the ninth: three up, three down. One was a routine throw from our shortstop to first base, and the other two were fantastic consecutive strike outs.

I really enjoy watching our team play, even in the rain. We sat in the bleachers the whole time (my dad and I) because, frankly, I prefer their view and the freedom of space to the confines of the reserved seats, even though we had reserved tickets from my dad’s work. I got a little wet, but it was worth it.

Final score: 14 - 1. That is all.