A Tale of Two Games

 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was a game of hitting, it was a game of scoreless innings; it was a game of defence, it was a game of errors; it was a game of comebacks, and a game of not quite enough. Storm seemed like two different teams depending on the inning in the game against Broadway.

In the first two innings, Broadway played all the hits as Storm were Les Miserables. Before the game a couple of players were joking about earned run average and whether it could be called that when we don’t keep track of errors, only to discover that Big Daddy D sometimes keeps track of earned versus unearned runs when he is bored in the outfield. After a ground ball was thrown away and another ball was booted, The Saskatchewan Muskie  informed Big Daddy D that he should start keeping track of the unearned runs because there were going to be a lot of them. He was right.  Broadway mercied Storm in each of the first two innings. Broadway definitely earned some of their runs as they were the producers of a couple of massive hits over the fence, but Storm certainly gave them a few encores with extra outs. Storm only recorded three outs total in the first two innings, and one of them was a home run out! 

Giving up runs wouldn’t have been so much of a problem if Storm had been able to score runs. However, Storm was shut out across the first two innings. They  turned into a different team in the the 3rd. They remembered how to hit and scored the max six. Storm was patient, as there were four walks, and they got some timely hits to reach the max. They also finally kept Broadway from mercying them. They gave up three runs, and made the game slightly more respectable. 

The Jekyll and Hyde nature of Storm continued in the fourth. Storm scored five more in the top to bring the score to 15-11. After being down 12-0, that was quite an achievement. But there was a monkey with cymbals lurking in the background waiting for this Broadway show to turn into a circus. And it did. Storm was mercied again in the fourth and the inning ended with an inside the park grand slam. This was a ground ball to 2nd, but on direct orders from El Presidente, Toeless Joe Jackson was playing more of a short rover than 2nd base and couldn’t get over. The ball then made it past a sliding right centre fielder and a diving left centre fielder and made it all the way to the fence. 

Having seemingly given up, Storm only scored one in the top of the 5th, and with time running out, it seemed like they would run out of time before they would run out of outs. At this point, Toeless Joe, who was desperate to get some balls in his hands started asking to pitch. The team thought they’d give old Batting Practice Thomas one more chance. Apparently someone should have threatened him with the hook earlier, because he went on to record six out of the next eight batters in record time giving Storm the chance they would need to come back. Storm scored four in the six to make it close.

As the seventh inning started, Toeless Joe called his own home run shot as he was adding up how many runs Storm needed to win the game, and he did, indeed come up as the tying run. Though he insisted he was not going to miss his shot, he of course did, and the game ended with a long fly ball out. Not only Argentina  was crying for Storm as they fell just short of a comeback after giving away so many runs in the beginning of the game. 

Check out the Podcast of the game as reported by;

Scoops Jockovitch

Boxscore
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Total
Storm	0	0	6	5	1	4	3	19
Broadway	6	6	3	6	0	0	x	21