Okay, a little late, but I thought it worthwhile to take a bit of time to report on the kickball tournament that I mentioned in my last post.

There was some talk going back and forth in the morning about whether or not we were going to play. It had rained the last 2 nights, and we weren’t sure about how muddy it was going to be. We decided to play anyways and the field was not wet or muddy at all – it was perfect conditions with the sun behind clouds and a temperature in the 60s. I guess originally 22 teams signed up but 5 cancelled leaving 17. We had a few of our players nancy up, so I had to scramble in the morning to find a few subs, but eventually we got a team of 9 together and headed down to the field.

The rules were 4 innings, and each inning was either 3 outs or going through your entire batting order, whichever came first. Games were played to 10 runs. We won our first game without too much difficulty. We had 3 girls on our team (you were required to play 2) and ours played pretty well. I was playing deep right-center field and played pretty well I think. I made a few good catches though I did bobble and drop one.

Then it was time for Game 2. While we were waiting for an open field, one of the players on our team was campaigning to play this other team (Team 7) that he knew. The tournament director set that up for us and off we went. If you will remember from my last post, I mentioned one particular guy that was very competitive among other things. Well this fellow was on this “Team 7” and all the things I worried about happening in the basketball game happened in kickball. They kicked first and in the very first inning there were fair/foul problems. There were cones down the left/right field lines but it wasn’t very obvious and there weren’t umpires. So they had a few guys on and one of their guys kicked it down there. They called it fair, we called it foul, and while we were “discussing” it, they continued to run. We eventually gave in and let them have it as fair, but in the meantime all their runners scored while we were talking about it. Not that big of a deal since it WAS fair after all. But then in the bottom of the first, the exact same thing happened and then they had the gall to complain about our runners doing the exact same thing! And the one we kicked was DEFINITELY fair as I was watching it down the line from behind home plate.

Now, before I can continue with this post, you will need to take this small quiz (don’t worry you won’t leave the page):

As you might have imagined, late in the game, the bunting started. We entered the 4th and final inning up 8-2, and then on came the bunting. So here’s my major problem with bunting. The way the games were set up we had no catcher, nor did we have a pitcher (since you pitched to your own team). So yes, you COULD just tap the ball down the 3rd base line, and since the bases were so short (and the kickball itself was not very easily throwable), it was impossible to throw the person out at 1st. For awhile, we did move one of our players close in, but then they risk getting a hard fast one without enough time to react and catch it.

The bunting continued (accompanied by lame comments like “All day long baby”) all inning long. It seems like it would be pretty easy to throw the person out at 3rd and/or home plate when the force was on, but I forget why that wasn’t so. Maybe they kicked away at that point. In any case, we got no outs and they ended up tied 8-8 with a runner on 3rd and their last person up to bat. (Remember that you only got to go through your order once). As you may imagine, when you play like this, the last person pretty much has to just keep running until they get out. It does no good for him to get a double since there is nobody left to drive him in. There’s no downside to continuing to run and hoping they miss you with the ball or something. Anyway, the guy kicked it deep and I caught it. The runner on 3rd tagged and went to home plate. We disputed that this run should not count, since once I caught the batter’s ball, the inning should be over. We were saying that it was the 3rd out, which while not technically true (since it wasn’t the fact that there were 3 outs that ended this particular inning but the end of the batting order), still seems like a valid comparison. They made the claim that there was only one out. I could see their reasoning but I think an impartial arbiter would side with us.

Anyways, we let them have it and then went up for our bats. We promptly scored the tying and winning runs on 3 hits and a sacrifice fly and the game was over. It was extra-satisfying to beat a bunch of bunters.

Game 3 was again vs. a bunch of bunters. Even though we talked loudly about how we hated bunting, they kept their 3rd baseman (a girl) in really close. One of our kickers nailed one right down the 3rd base line right at her (not intentionally AFAIK), and to her immense credit she caught it right in the stomach and held on for the out. We won this game too and proceeded to the finals. I led off the game with a long kick over everyone’s head but they managed to get it in quickly and due to my not paying attention, I was thrown out between 3rd and home. We proceeded to lose 8-1. At least it wasn’t to a bunch of bunters. They did have one girl kind of tap the ball but after all the crap she was given, she kicked away in her other times at bat.

It was a lot of fun. After the game, I did some Google searching and was pleased to find that just about every site I saw was anti-bunting. Including the aptly-named NoBunting.com, which even had cool T-shirts