nearly all that was said about our trip to alamo territory hits the center of the mitt: we had a fine time; jimmy preller organized the 101 things of such a trip very well; the weather forecast called for "continuous rain" that weekend, but it held off long enough for us to play four good games in temperatures that averaged 74 degrees with slight cooling breezes. more than once i leaned back in the dugout and thought, lordy, this is good: it's still winter in the rest of the country - snowing in denver, too cold to throw outdoors in albany - but we've got baseball weather here. hmmhmph! hot sweeeeet potatoes!
and the games produced a dozen or more early season memories - from mike kane and todd calhoun pitching as if they were in mid-season form to virtually every batter in the lineup teeing off on more than one pitch he liked.
all this is a prelude to a point, a clarifiication, really: there was no forfeit. our host skip bradley called me about 11 a.m. sunday - the day of the championship game - and said that the field we were to play on was simply too wet for a game. i passed the message along to the guys. i spoke with skip today: he said there was a big puddle between first and second and another at short on sunday morning. the two teams that were to play each other at 10 a.m. at that field - to decide which one would play us - had shown at 9 a.m. for the game along with the umpires and they all went home later when they saw they couldn't play. that afternoon, several members of the albany team apparently went to check the field, saw it was dry and wondered why we didn't play. skip said he made the call in the morning because of the field conditions and because the forecast called for more rain (which came later that night.)
so while we didn't get to play in the trophy game, there was no shame in that. only rain and the tournament director's reluctant call.
I think that the puddles may have been from those two teams peeing themselves at the thought of facing the Albany line-up with already tired pitching staffs. After we scored 21, 10, and 16 in our last three games, they couldn't have been thrilled with the prospect of battling each other, just to get to the championship game against us. Little did they know that we didn't have any other pitchers that could have matched what Todd and Mike had done to their line-ups in the previous two games. Oh well, what could have been?! It was likely to have been a fun baseball game with a football score. Thanks to all who put together this trip. It certainly wet the appetite for future trips to this wonderful climate for preseason action.
