Score: 6-3 (5 innings); 0-1 (3 innings)
Location: Patrick Henry Elementary School (Arlington, VA)
These boys of summer decided to bookend the DC summer with a Memorial Day game in May and now this Labor Day game in September. The whole summer was just a buildup to this one glorious moment: the Bluth Monster back on the field.
On this early morn game day, the Arlington contingent got held up a bit by the wiffler with a newborn, but thankfully the delay didn't extend past the 15-minute mark so we didn't need to invoke tardy laps like in the days of Provo wiffle.
When we got to the field we tried to connect with Bluth who was coming in from Fairfax and hadn't been to the field before. We scanned around in circles and suddenly saw him appearing from a right-fielderly direction. His entrance had a magical glow to it: kind of like Ray Cansella appearing through the cornfields in 'Field of Dreams,' or possibly even like Sir Lancelot's death charge in 'Monty Python's Holy Grail.'
We hit for teams and started to play. The combination of some rain that had fallen the night before and a fairly thick haze of humidity in the air made for a pitcher's ballpark.
Lambino was seeing the ball well (and pitching well) most of the day and started off the first with a few good knocks. Bluth took some time to shake the rust off and started off early with a strikeout or two and some weak hits to the pitcher (me).
A-Man and I were making some decent contact but not enough to overcome the deadzone in left center, as well as Bluth's impressive defense -- on one occasion he charged in for a grounder from deep left and dove on the ball and snatched it with one hand just before it stopped rolling; and then performed a very graceful somersault follow-through. He explained that we shouldn't be surprised by this: that he had a history of compensating for his declining bat skills with excellent defense.
In the middle innings Bluth engaged me in an at bat for the ages. He ran me up to 10 or so pitches by continuing to foul off some quality put-away pitches. We then had a showmanship contest of calling for timeouts, balking, stepping out of the batters box, etc. (and then the catcher, Paul, called for a timeout of his own). In the final pitch of the AB Bluth blasted one over the monkey bars in left field. I commented, "that's not a bat you want to wake up."
In the end Paul had a dinger and a triple, Bluth had a couple badonkadonks, I had one of my own, and A-man fell victim to the uncooperative left field (as well as to the stress of a newborn). A-Man and I just couldn't get the bats going and we lost 6-3.
Since it was a quick game we decided to squeeze in a 3-inning double header. A-Man's Livan Hernandez "slurve" really threw Bluth off, and watching from left field it looked to me like he swung about 5 feet in front of the pitch. The aforementioned challenging hitter conditions, coupled with the fact that the distance between home plate and the pitchers mound had somehow narrowed by about 5 feet made for a very low-scoring game. Both pitchers dueled but in the end, with only one out to work with in the bottom of the 3rd inning, A-Man clocked one to straightaway center for the walk-off victory.
Game Highlights:
- Paul struck out thrice against A-Man, once on a 6-2 count, once on a 4-2 count (on both occasions A-Man just kept throwing it in there and neither one of us felt like mentioning that he had technically walked already), and once on a called 3rd strike, courtesy of catcher Bluth who said that it might not have been a strike locationwise, he's just a sucker for good movement. (Paul is just now learning about the first 2 controversial strikeouts.)
- A-Man had a ball crumple on him after hitting it; something you don't see as much in the live-ball era. I commented that had Crato been in attendance he would have yelled out: "Damage!"
- In honor of Jane Lambert we all met for waffles afterwards with the Wiffle Wives Club. By the way, don't ever get Trader Joe's hash browns -- you're better off driving to the nearest Denny's and taking out.
Game report by Pace Barker
