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TCBA Yearbook |
1939 |
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INDEX Seasons 1911 1912 1913 1921 1922 1923 1930 1931 1932 1940 1941 1942 1950 1951 1952 1960 1961 1962 1970 1971 1972 1980 1981 1982 1990 1991 1992 2000 2001 2002 2010 2011 2012 2020 2021 2022 Miscellaneous |
Comments:
Marty Fiehl - GAME
7: THIS ONES FOR ALL THE MARBLES! In what has been a
truly enjoyable series so far, we’ve come down to this: ONE GAME……One
Winner…..One Plaque! BOTH squads deserve
to win this one, and NIETHER squad deserves to lose it. But, this ain’t
modern day grade school, where everyone now gets a ribbon just for showing
up! J Larry has been looking
forward to this challenge since back in 1999, when at Willow Valley, Al
promised to ‘make it worth his while’ if the Mirthmakers can win the Gold
Championship.
Sixteen years
later……..the possibility re-presents itself…………but with the caveat that the
Pope has to have departed from the Eastern Seaboard, as he doesn’t give his
blessing to ‘gambling’ or ‘wagers’. The Pope also turned
down Larry’s request for a ‘Free Ride in the PopeMobile’ if the Mirthmakers
could beat Fiehl’s Heathens, aka, the Ainspans! Stick Fiehl had also
planned on some Intervention Help when he negotiated with The Man Down Under
and offered to give up air conditioning in his reserved room if he could have
some help just making it to Game 7 versus Mimosa. (How do you think I
got the Rain Delay reducing Dizzy Dean a full 8 grades, and the next game
where Mimosa’s starting pitchers arm fell off before he threw the first
pitch?! That was necessary, and got us to this point, but didn’t
come cheap, as I’ll be sweating my ass off for Eterniy!)
So with the stage
set, and five minutes before gametime on Teamviewer, we stretch a bit, and
send the invitiation out to Larry.
Here we go: Castor (gr 8) for
Mimosa Tamulus (gr 5 L) for
Starrucca Both are needed to go
deep Mimosa has about 8
WB’s left from Jumbo Brown in their pen. Starr has about 7
wb’s left from a mediocre reliever in theirs. It could get to
double digits for either or both teams before the bullpens can get called
upon. Top 1…….this inning can
best be subtitled with “WTF?!” being exclaimed by the Mimosa GM.
THREE errors, count
em, THREE in the first inning by the Mimosa fielders lead to 3 undeserved
Starrucca runs. I say
‘undeserved’…….but I’ll take ‘em ! J A real ‘punch to the
gut’ though for the Mirthmaker team to spot us 3 runs before they even get to
the plate. Top 2…..three
straight hits by Starrucca lead to another run……..could have been much more,
but Ernie Lombardi saves Mimosa’s bacon by picking a runner off secondbase. Still, Starrucca goes
up 4-0 Bot 2………..Lombardi
leads it off with a single….and the Mirthmakers follow with three MORE hits,
to plate 2 runs this inning, and begin a fine comeback, halving the Starrucca
lead. Now 4-2. This hitting and
scoring is pretty much what was expected with the lesser end of our rotations
squaring up against each other today. And then, things went
cold:
FIVE consecutive
SHUTOUT innings by BOTH pitchers surprise the crap out of both managers, and
take us thru 7 complete innings with Starrucca hanging on to their 4-2 edge. Top 8……..Starrucca
scores a big insurance run and hits back to back TRIPLES! (we seem to do that a
lot…….the triples thing. We stroke NINE of them in this series!) Spans now up 5-2, but
our pitcher is surely running out of gas about at this point in the game. Bot 8……Mimosa begins
the charge. A walk and a double
puts two ducks on the pond…
…………as we go to our
last hope to hold onto the game; grade 7* Sundra, with 7 wb’s left in
the tank enters the fray. But up steps Ernie
Lombardi for Mimosa. He has been Mimosa’s
BEST hitter in this series, and was THIRD in the batting race for this Tcba
Season! He will end up hitting
.467 for this 7 game playoff series…starting every game at catcher! He’s exactly who
Mimosa wants at the plate right now.
Other than the fact that
Ernie has a lot of balls…………… He’s got a Big Bat to
go with it! (at least that’s what
Mrs Lombardi says…) And he comes thru
here for Mimosa and raps an rbi single up the middle! 5-3 Starrucca, with
mimosa runners on 1st and 3rd. Go ahead run is at the
plate. A groundout to
shortstop scores another Mirthmaker run, making it 5-4 Starrucca, and Sundra
retires the last batter to end the inning. But Mimosa makes a
BIG Comeback, closes the gap to 5-4, and every pitch and batter is important
the rest of the way out. Top 9……Jumbo Brown
(19*) comes to the mound for Mimosa…..they want to hold Starrucca right here
and do whatever they can in the bottom of the ninth to tie or win it. Jumbo gets the first
two Starrucca outs easily. Then the wear and
tear of his fourth game in relief starts to get to him a bit…… He WALKS the next two
batters…………… And gives up a single
to score a HUGE Starrucca insurance run……………….they are now up 6-4.
Hmmmm…..I wonder why
they called him “Jumbo”? Maybe he ate a lot of
peanuts. J Bot 9……………It all
comes down to this for Mimosa…….. They need two runs to
keep this thing going, and the grade 7* starrucca pitcher on the mound has 4
workable batters left. If Mimosa can get
some runners on, the grade 1 relievers on the Ainspans will be coming into
play. Bobby Doerr steps
in…………………………….he flys out for one. Mickey Haslin steps
in…………………………he flys out for two. Maggert steps in…………………….he
gets less distance on it, and pops out to the infield! Mimosa goes down
1-2-3 and just like that, its over. With all of the
comebacks and scoring threats thruout the series, somehow, I think we just
expected a Mimosa runner or two to be on base and score a run or
two. I know I did. The 1-2-3 inning left
me surprised, and without words. (but I still got
pictures) !
Sure we
celebrated……..but we also have to tip our cap to the Mirthmakers in this one:
Starrucca had a GOOD
team this season…………………. But Mimosa had a
GREAT one! Not only did they
lead the league in wins by a large margin……. But look at these
last 7 playoff games: -
Starrucca came in fully rested, whereas Mimosa had to
battle a good Kilkenny team to a full SEVEN games…..with an xtra inning
battle in game 7! Their Ace starting pitcher had to toss THREE games in
that one, rendering him a 1 start pitcher in the Starrucca Finals. That
made a HUGE difference in our series. -
Game 3…the Mimosa starting pitcher (Dean 19z) had to wait
out a rain delay and came back as an 11z. EIGHT points were taken away
from him. A 19z is almost unhittable, an 11z was hittable to the extent
that we then scored 8 runs off him in and won that ballgame. Without
the rain delay, there’s no way Mimosa loses that one. -
Game 4….The mimosa starting pitcher (grade 13z) doesn’t
get to throw even ONE pitch before he gets pulled into the trainers room and
is injured for the rest of eternity. Mimosa needed to burn another
pitchers start and 9 innings or relief to make up for that…..and they came
out winners in this one. -
Game 7…..their defense made FIVE errors behind the
pitchers in the ultimate showdown for the plaque. This was NOT what the
Mimosa GM had envisioned, and he certainly didn’t deserve that kind of
play. It looked like Jerry Lewis back there trying to field a ground
ball. J Weigh that against
the bad breaks suffered by the Ainspans…. -
I had asked my wife to bring me a beer during the middle
of game 2…….and she brought me apple cider instead. Damn. That was it. Nothing major
happened to our detriment. No injuries, no major
outbreak of miscues, we were even fortunate in that the shipment of bras for
the Ainspan ballgirls never arrived at the stadium, so the last two games
were a pleasure to watch when we weren’t busy playing ball.
So my point is: Mimosa had ALL THIS
stuff go against him, players being drastically reduced in grade, players
being injured, ballgirls distracting them, etc, etc…………and they STILL had the
depth, talent, and managerial skill to take this series right to the last
inning of the last game of the 7 game series. Without these flukey
catastrophes, they would have made short work of the Ainspans, and it would
have been a long bus ride back home with only some rotgut whiskey and the
ballgirls to console us. (okay, that wouldn’t
have been all that bad either) It was a fun time,
I’m glad Larry and I were able to split it up into a few different sessions,
as it helped add to the drama a bit for us. After viewing the
final stats, I think it came down to ONE thing, statistically:
“The Walks, boss, the
Walks!” Although the overall
stats show some similarities, such as we left the same amount of men on base,
neither one of us had any legs to steal worth a crap, and we both scored the
same amount of runs…………….. Mimosa’s league
leading pitching certainly stifled my hits, but we were able to show a lot of
patience and chalk up a crapload of walks. Mostly against Clay
Bryant, whom in his two starts surrendered 14 of them……………..and we won both
of those games. Starrucca DID lead
the league in walks, so this wasn’t entirely unexpected…..but Bryant sure
didn’t need to carry a gas with him to the mound whenever he threw the ball. Below, is the Mimosa
pitching coach on one of his frequent visits to the mound to try and point
Bryant in the right direction:
For those just
looking at stats……………THAT was the difference maker this series. To those who PLAYED
the series……we know that the BREAKS of the game played another major part in
this seasons Starrucca victory. Its not so much that
WE were lucky, but more so that the Mirthmakers were devoid of any luck
whatsoever.
Now, on the BRIGHT
side for Mimosa……………the series loss puts him right back into the Feeble Four
and he now has a ¼ chance to land the Splendid Splinter! Ted Williams is back
on the Menu for Mimosa! And it’s a four course
meal, being served from 1939 thru 1942!
Good Luck Larry! You deserve it after
this one!
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