Exeter Men's Softball - Tournament Round #2

Tuesday night we faced Sun Pacific in the Men's 'B' Division semi-finals. The winner would move on to face the division champions, Garcia & Company. We started off pretty hot, the bats were working, and we played good defense. By the fourth inning we were up 10-4 and things seemed to be going as planned. Slowly but surely Sun Pacific chipped away at our lead and before we knew it it was 10-10 in the bottom of the seventh inning. One run would end the game, but we couldn't manage it. We had to go extra innings. In about the eight inning things got a bit interesting with Sun Pacific up 12-10 we scored a run and put a runner on third with one out. Sun Pacific's left fielder had been running his mouth all night and disagreed with a call the umpire had made that allowed us to score the run. The father of one of our players said something to the left fielder and the left fielder decided he'd walk off the field and lay a whoopin' on him. BIG MISTAKE. You see our right-center fielder runs about 6'3"/230lbs, is as strong as an ox, and his dad was about to get assaulted. You can imagine he wasn't going to stand around and let that happen. In the end their left fielder got the worst of it and was ejected along with our right-center fielder. The game continued into the ninth inning, us one player short in the field. We went into "California shootout" mode. In a California shootout a runner is placed at second base, which is a scoring position, and you play the inning like you would any other inning. We managed to come up with some VERY good stops to get out of the inning and I was placed at second base as our runner to start the inning. The other team wisely walked our next batter because it didn't hurt to put him on since we already had someone at first and one run would end the game. The very next batter decided it by stroking the ball right between the 5/6 hole, pushing me around for the winning run. Game over, we advanced to the finals!