Storm wins meaningless game against A's

Storm won a game that meant absolutely nothing to anybody on a warm Wednesday night. Storm had already clinched first place, and the A’s had a tight grip on the title of horse’s ass, so the game was for pride, or whatever slopitch players play for.

There were some highlights for Storm defensively. In the first inning, Al recorded all three outs (two by strikeout and one on a ground ball). Ken was looking like Cal Ripken, no wait, he was more bionic than iron, so maybe he was channelling  Col. Steve Austin. Either way, he looked great at short, which allowed Joey to hop around the outfield. Joey made a couple of nice grabs, but he was behaving rather like ET as every throw from the outfield looked like it was going home, rather than to the appropriate cutoff person. There were no obvious holes in the defence, though, and Storm held the A’s to one home run and five runs total.

Offensively, Storm was storming around the bases, their bats were made of thunder, the lightning struck more than twice as they rained down runs on the A’s. Or something like that. The only person with something to play for was Duran, who needed six home runs for the league lead. Storm actually hit enough that his spot in the order came up six times, but he was only able to launch one for a homer, and sprayed the rest around the field for a couple of singles and a double.

The whole team batted well, and the defence was strong, but there is one area of the game that has been haunting Storm all year, and that is baserunning. We saw another couple of baserunning blunders in this game. The Thane of Whitby wandered too far off third on a ground ball to the pitcher. He said he was trying to distract the pitcher, but when the pitcher bobbled the ball he took another step or two. He was now in blood stepp’d in so far that should he wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er, and as he tried to go o’er, he was tagged out in a rundown. Brian seemed to think that Brad’s running was textbook, and on a groundball to short LATER THE SAME INNING, Brian wandered too far off the base. He stopped, and the shortstop threw behind him to third. Brian pulled out some ballerina moves nobody knew were in his repertoire as he did the splits sliding back into third avoiding a tag.

Storm    29   -   A's 5

Boxscore
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Total
Storm	0	4	5	6	4	10	x	29
A's	3	0	0	2	0	0	x	5

 

Notable Boxscores:

Everyone hit well except Al, which makes his 2 for 6 stand out (though the last one felt like a mercy ground out to help the A’s out of an inning)

Sam went 5 for 6 and claims his final out (which was the final out of the season) was a mercy out to end the inning