All day event

In the last post I mentioned we had a double header. It wasn't what we expected. Our game against Myrtle Beach (Braves) got rained out so usually what happens is we play two 7 inning games. But the Dash had sold out their luxury boxes or something so rather than exchange those tickets out and lose money the front office had us play two 9 inning games. Something like that.

So I got to the field at 8:45 for our 12pm game which we lost 5-0. Then we waited around at the field for the night game at 7pm. I started the game and went 6 innings, allowing 1 run on 3 hits. I don't think I had any 3 ball count. It was 1-1 after 6 when I was taken out. It remained that way and we went into extra innings. I think the mutual feeling was like "wow really? extra inning in the 2nd game of a double header?"

We didn't know what was in store for us. The innings kept sailing by. They scored a run in two different innings, but we tied it up both times and so we kept going. Our bullpen was really thin and we had to stretch guys out to amounts of pitches/innings they weren't used to. About the 15th inning the feeling changed to something like "well who cares how long this goes we gotta win this damn game no matter what."

20th inning. We are now out of pitching. We put in our utility infield/outfield guy Kyle Shelton who played 12 innings at 2nd base, 7 innings in Left Field and now he was on the mound. Leadoff hit, bunt, fly ball, fly ball...scoreless inning. We came in all pumped up . During the game we were trying all kinds of stuff to start a rally. We did "rally mids" (your pants are mid shin...brutal look basically), we tried pants above the knees. We tried "rally shades" (everyone wears sunglasses). We had our sleeveless jerseys on so in the 20th we rolled up our sleeves so our bare arms were showing. We had guys on 1st and 3rd with 2 outs and our catcher who had caught all 20 innings got a base hit to right field and all rushed the field and celebrated. We threw a party out there it was awesome.

We all rolled into the clubhouse and just starting yelling and screaming for about 5 minutes no joke. We started banging our charis and we flipped over our couches and tables and started throwing playing cards up in the air. It was beautiful chaos. I think we were all delirious.

So we got a 20 inning 5:30 hour victory...still the 2nd longest game I ever played to the 5:40 in the college world series. This one felt waaaaay longer. 29 innings in a day turned out to be a blast.

link to game article:
http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20100520&content_id=10230876&vkey=news_t580&fext=.jsp&sid=t580