Dear dimwit on the phone

Good call apeman.
The defensive team ran a shift in bunting situations where they placed the rightfielder directly on second base.
Girl on first, the first baseman stood as close to home as possible.
The girl pops the bunt up, first baseman dives, hits the tip of her glove, rolls to pitcher, who throws to the rightfielder covering second for your average 3-1-9 force out.

 

Ok, sinking line drive down the first-base line. Runner at first holds, figuring the ball will be caught.

First baseman fumbles the ball. Pitcher covers first, takes throw, but too late to beat the runner/batter. Pitcher then throws to right fielder covering second, who tags out the poor baserunner who got a late start leaving first and was caught in no man's land.

I still have no idea why the right fielder would be covering second base, unless it's one of those funky alignments where the coach moves the secondbaseman to the left of the bag for a right-handed pull hitter and brings an outfielder in to the infield???

 

They ran the shift multiple times. Later in the game a left-handed hitter hit a routine fly to right, but there was no one there, leading to an RBI triple on a ball the went about 150 feet.

 

Dear organizer of alumni football games wanting to be in the local sports listings:

Thanks for the note about teams forming in my area. It was really exciting to learn that not only was the local continuation school forming a team, but so was Tiny Christian, which, according to two sources I found via Google, has an enrollment of six. Do a little research before going on a fishing expedition for free advertising next time.

 

Today, I received not one but TWO calls from a girls soccer mom two counties over from us (about 45 miles away). Their team is supposed to be travelling to face our team in the quarterfinal round of the state playoffs Saturday. Problem is, visiting team has their prom Saturday. They tried to get the home school's coach, AD and principal to move the game to Friday (or at least early Saturday afternoon), but they wouldn't budge.

Soccer moms from two counties over are calling us asking us to write a story about it and how their girls' lives are being ruined (they've already bought dresses, this is an important moment in their lives, etc.). All this despite the fact that they have their own paper in that county.

While I feel bad for the girls, us writing a story isn't going to do anything to change the game time. Also, from a business standpoint, I'm not going to tick off the locals who actually subscribe to our paper at the request of people who live more than an hour away.

 

An interesting sidebar though...can't you play the game, change into your dress and enjoy the end of prom? Or what I've seen more often is the schools work together and moved the game to earlier in the afternoon.

 

Why wouldn't you write a column on the school being dicks for not changing the time to early Saturday?

 

Why not write it? It's a good story. Why is your school doing it?

And, seriously, if you are worrying about "ticking off the locals," you might want to re-think your approach.

 

Actually, I got a pretty good story out of an alumni football game. Two local rivals got it together a couple of years ago as a fund-raiser. The players had to be out of high school eight years to be eligible to play, but other than that it was full-contact, pin-yer-ears back football.

Ended up being a pretty decent game, and they took it very seriously. One school had a kicker who'd played in the NFL, and he nailed a 51-yarder for what turned out to be the winning points. There was even a brief exchange of fisticuffs when a player from one team got run out of bounds with what he felt was a little too much gusto. All-in-all, one of the more fun stories I've done in recent years.

 

we had a baseball team that played regionals on graduation day last year. They played the regional semi at 10 am, the seniors drove back home and walked across the stage, then drove back and played the regional final at 7

 

Great story!

 

Dicks? Sorry, but I don't get that. The girls' lives aren't be ruined. Make it work, one way or the other. It's about time they learn that life isn't fair all of the time.