Reflections from 8/24

Coming off of a league championship and an abbreviated off-season, the Lollygaggers opened the fall season with a pair of hard-fought victories over the Rounders, 13-10 and 19-15. We didn't necessarily play our best... we exhibited a bit of curious baserunning and had our struggles in the field; but we made up for it with some timely hitting and two-out rallies. Pretty sure we scored 19 runs in just three innings in game #2, so the bats were definitely coming to life.

-Matt (not to be confused with Queeney) made his Lollygagger debut, and Jeremy returned after a few seasons abroad. Unfortunately, Jeremy's triumphant return was cut short when he took a throw to the back of the head while legging out a triple... hopefully he's doing ok, and is not concussed;
-the guy who hit Jeremy with the errant throw acted like a giant douche all night, capping it off by pulling an A-Rod and yelling "I got it!" as our fielders converged on a pop-up (which was caught anyway), and refusing to acknowledge his transgression when called out by Steve... it's always more fun beating a team with a good villain;
-Erick displayed destructive tendencies all night... during warm-ups, he baited Steve into tossing a ball to him, and then moved out of the way so that it narrowly missed injuring two small children who were playing nearby. After (intentionally?) throwing balls into nearby parked cars, he later put his destructive urges to good use by smashing a clutch 3-run HR;
-Henley got a lot of running in with a couple of inside-the-park "HRs", assisted by their outfielder throwing the ball directly into the ground

Victorious

So my blogging pretty much fell apart this season, through some combination of work actually being busy, rainouts, and just running out of new and creative ways to make fun of Quast. But it was a great season, during which the Lollygaggers finished with the best regular season record and managed to rally to win five in-a-row to claim the tournament championship. It was a lot of fun, and a great team effort.

It was something of a transition season for the Lollygaggers: we saw the retirement of an original, Chris "Big Show" Gandia, who is going on to bigger and better shows at Columbia Law School, but will always remain a Lollygagger at-heart; Will Peng joined us as a full-time player (when he's not coaching Little League, that is), and came up huge for us in the playoffs; and finally, Henley made his return to the team, and came through with the game-winning hit for us in the championship game, with his newborn son in attendance... pretty awesome.

No snarky comments from me today - just enjoying the afterglow from a great season. The good thing about all of the rainouts is that we'll only have to wait a couple of weeks to get the fall season started. I have no doubt my sarcasm will be back by then.

Great work, gentlemen.