I look down at my phone and it says 5:50. I take a deep breath and quicken my march. As I hit the outskirts of the park I realize I will make it on time but I don't like cutting it so close. The game starts at 6 and it looks like I will make it to the field by 5:55. I still had to wrap my leg, change shoes, put on my knee brace and my ankle brace. Luckily, walking a near 20 minute walk in less than 15 minutes will loosen your body up some so I thought I could get away with not stretching.
When I arrived at the field there were only 6 of my teammates there and 1 of them was injured and not going to play! It was 5 minutes to game time! Normally you'd need 10 to play. Most weeks we have a handful of players who are a little late but I was hoping they wouldn't be too late today because I thought we had a real chance to win this game.
When I looked at our schedule I saw many familiar names. I saw teams we played in the season earlier this summer and some we played last summer but there were a few team names I had never seen before. Now they could have been teams who changed their names or others who were spinoffs from veteran teams but I suspected and definitely hoped that some of these "new" sounding teams sounded that way because they were in fact new.
The team we were playing last night had one of those new names. Since this was the 2nd week of this season, it was quite possible this team was only playing their 2nd game. I was really hoping that was the case. Quite often over the past 2 years we ran into teams that were more cohesive and far more experienced than us and it certainly shows out there in the field.
As I frantically bandaged my leg, changed shoes and put on my temporary Kickapotamus t-shirt I looked around and saw that we were up to 3 males and 4 females. The umpire was pressuring us to get ready to play with however many we had. 7 against 10 would give a sizeable advantage to the other side. Our team captain, who was out for the game with an injured ankle, was given the choice of whether we wanted to kick first or play out in the field first. In a wise move, she chose for us to kick first. That way we might give any of our missing teammates a few extra minutes to arrive before we had to take the field.
The first of many strange things began to happen. We kicked well in that first inning and actually scored 2 runs. Starting well isn't something we're used to. As we took the field for the first time with only 7 of us we were clinging to a 2-0 lead and hoping that the other team would help us with some bad kicks. As you might have imagined, we were spread out pretty thin. There were a lot of holes and large areas to kick the ball to in our defense.
That first inning was a little shaky but we got our 3 outs and still held on to a 2-1 lead. Then as we jogged off the field after collecting that 3rd out, another one of our male players arrived. That picked up our moods even more than owning a slim lead. Then with a new leg to help us we had another big inning and scored plenty more runs. We took the field in the next inning with a more realistic defense considering we were playing 8 against 10. At least we had 3 infielders and 3 outfielders. People still had to cover more area than normal but it felt doable.
As we made our way through those first couple innings a few things became obvious. First it seemed like no one else from our team was going to show and second, this team we were playing were in fact brand new and only in their 2nd game. Without being too insulting, they were pretty bad and they reminded me of how we looked those first few weeks we played. There were drops, bad throws, bad kicking, no knowledge of rules, people tripping over bases and a large collection of mental errors.
On the other hand, we made most of our catches. We hit people with many of our throws. Our kicking was stellar and our baserunning was as good as I'd ever seen it. It was like our runners could sense the other team was fumbling and bumbling out there and suddenly conservative runners became more aggressive and the runs kept pouring in. As the innings passed our lead grew and grew and the other team was starting to get testy. Imagine that? We were beating someone so badly that THEY were starting to get pissy and they were arguing rules that they thought we were breaking even though they didn't even know them themselves. It was getting to the point where it wasn't a good idea for us to argue anything or even bring up a minor point because there were a few guys on that team ready to blow a gasket.
I found the whole thing really funny. We routinely get our asses kicked and we are never sore losers. More than that we have a lot of fun despite whatever happens. I guess that's why the league likes us so much and newspaper writers pretend to want to write stories on us. We didn't have our bongos or half our team but we won convincingly 24-7 and we were playing 2 players short! I still can't believe how well everyone did. Well, I can believe it but considering the odds and how things were looking from the beginning I'm so proud of everyone. After the game it occurred to me that we had to wait about 14 months between wins but something tells me we won't have to wait that long for the next one!
Viva Kickapotamus!
Our next game is Monday night at 6pm, tentatively scheduled for Delaware Park, on the actual Park side this time.
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