Where to start...

Geez. It gets to be so long between posts and there are so many things in my head that I would love to talk about.
If I tried to I would be typing for days.

I guess I'll start with baseball.
In my last post I referred to the boys' upcoming year end baseball tournament that weekend.
If you go back a year in this blog you'll see that the boys took gold in the tournament by beating Minto and the kid with the rocket arm.
What worked in our favour was that we had several strong pitchers and we saved my son B for the last game to seal it up.
The Minto team on the other hand, only had a couple of good pitchers but the rocket kid was their strength.
Last year he was used in Friday and Saturday's games and when it came down to the final game he couldn't play for as much of the game as if he didn't pitch at all.

This year was a different story, thanks to Mother Nature.

The tournament started pretty well the same as last year with our lads walking over the competition for the first 2 days assuring their spot in the final game on Sunday.
As we expected, the same team from Minto was going to be the other team. Just like last year.

Our coaches had the same strategy and worked it out so that we would use my other son T and the others to pitch and save B for Sunday's final game.
If he didn't pitch at all in any other game he was clear to pitch up to the maximum 85 pitches in the final game.
If he was called in to pitch in any of the other games it would mean that his pitch limit would be reduced by half since there was not enough time to rest between games.

Our advantage against Minto would be that the rocket kid would have been used either Friday or Saturday and would be limited to how many he could throw on Sunday.

B was not used Friday or Saturday and was clear for Sunday.

This is where Mother Nature came in and messed it up for us.
Sunday was rained out so the Final game was postponed until Tuesday night.

Great.
All of the pitchers on boths teams had enough rest and could throw up to 85 pitches in the game.

It turned out that that other kid held our guys back and our bats did not produce results.

B did a very good job on the mound but I'm sorry to say that it was not enough.
I don't want to seem like I'm blaming but there were some plays in our field that were rather sloppy and put us behind.
Minto's offence isn't the strongest but they didn't make the errors that we did that day.
Plus, without hits we couldn't get runs back.

I'm proud of our guys for the effort but Minto deserved that game.

Some people don't understand how a team may not be overjoyed at still winning a silver medal.
Looking at the guys in the photo above it doesn't look like they were overjoyed about it, does it?

In all fairness to them that picture was taken immediately after the game when they were still stinging.
I'm glad to say that within an hour or so they all seemed to be back to good spirits and feeling much better.

Look at it this way. They were the second best team in the entire league for 2011. That's pretty darn good.

So, another baseball season is done.

Yesterday I signed up the boys for the upcoming hockey season.
The leaves on the trees have started changing colours like crazy this week.
Before long the snow will be here and the seemingly eternal Canadian winter will be upon us.

But we have hockey.

Bring it on. :)

Stay well,
Tim