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We didn’t have a lot of hope entering Friday’s game. The team we were playing was 3-1 and they’d won some games by a large margin. Steve and I even had a brief discussion about saving our pitching for Saturday but ultimately decided not to do so.
And it was a good thing we didn’t because the game was a back and forth affair. We started Nate for 2 and then pitched Alex, Michael, and David for 1 each. Out of those players only Alex didn’t look good. He has a real hard time pitching out of the stretch so once that first player gets on it’s not good with him. Michael had looked good at practice, but in a real game wasn’t quite as good. David looks better but has some flaws we have to fix.
Our hitters looked pretty good with everyone getting on base either due to a walk or hit except Nate and Andrew. Of course we’d moved up Andrew to the lead-off spot so that wasn’t so great. I think he just put too much pressure on himself batting lead-off and so we’ll drop him back down some. Our runners weren’t nearly as aggressive as they could have been on the basepaths. In fact basically the only time they stole was when I told them to. We got two runs when their catcher over threw 3rd which was a nice present.
We held the lead as late as the top of the 6th. Jordan, our final pitcher, allowed 3 in the 6th, only 1 earned, and we did manage to score 1 to tie it up on the 6th. He looks good in the 7th and I’m feeling good about our chances heading into the bottom of the 7th. However, despite having our 12, 1, and 2 players at the plate we go down in order to send the game into extra innings.
This creates a little bit of a dilemma for us, as we’d gone through all the pitchers we’d wanted to pitch. So we ultimately decide to send Jordan up there to face their last four guys, and hopefully he can do so with the 14 pitches he has left before he hits his pitch maximum. He retires the first guy, but walks the next batter who advances to 3rd on stolen bases. He is then squeezed home. Jordan gets the second out of the inning on his last batter. We bring in Danny to get us the last out. We also agree that if the game goes into the 9th we’re going to use Justin rather than burn Danny for Saturday.
The bottom of the inning goes our way as the pitcher doesn’t have much control. We load the bases on a combination of hits and walks. Unfortunately there are some very generous strikes called, like one which nearly hit the plate, and Ryan, who’d been 3 for 3 with 3 runs and who would get the game ball, gets struck out to end the game. Sad thing is a base hit wins it for us as they’re not holding Alex on 2nd base and so he’s leading off nearly half way to second. Oh well, it was a valiant effort, and our best game yet.
Hopefully soon we can get over the hump and actually win one. We had adjusted our batting order before Saturday’s game, including dropping David down at his own request, so hopefully we’ll be able to put together some runs and see our pitching be just good enough to hold them off.
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