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2009 Season |
Edition No. 7 |
May 5, 2009 |
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Brethren,
Through four weeks of play in our 2009 Campaign, I provide you hereinbelow our current league standings:
Here are the point totals for the fourth week of the season:
Boys, I know that the primary purpose of our website and From the Bullpen is not to brag about my children’s athletic achievements, but you’re going to have to indulge me on this one, because the story is simply too good not to share.
Last Friday night, Will’s Dirtbags baseball team (13 year-olds) played the first game in a tournament held in Malcolm, Nebraska, a tiny little bedroom community of Lincoln about ten miles to the north and west of the Star City. Although a very small community, like many such settings in America, Malcolm has a little league baseball field which would stand out as a jewel just about anywhere.
In a bucolic rural setting just south of town, cut out of the surrounding cornfields, the Malcolm ballpark is a paradigm of all that is good and right about our country. Here the well-coached, immaculately-uniformed Malcolm Maddogs take on city slicker comers from Lincoln, Omaha, Sioux City and elsewhere. Coupled with the spectacular spring weather that we had last weekend, you could not have picked a better place on the planet to spend the weekend.
The Dirtbags were playing fairly decent against the Omaha Longhorns—a strong rival after the two teams split a hotly-contested two-game series in 2008—but found themselves down by a run as the game moved into the later innings. After our starting pitcher reached his pitch limit, Dirtbag pitching coach Scott Sorensen (a former Creighton Blue Jay hurler who pitched on the Creighton team that played in the 1991 College World Series) turned to young William Ernst, his designated stopper, to shut down the Longhorns. In three innings of work, with the rabid encouragement of his teammates and Coach Sorensen (“Gas ’em up, Ernie”), the steely-eyed flamethrower of the Dirtbags staff rung up 8 of the 12 hitters that he faced on strikeouts, earning the win for the Dirtbags when they pushed across a run in the bottom of the first extra inning. The bedlam that ensued among the 13-year-old Dirtbag players was a sight to behold.
After the game, Coach Sorensen, a fiery, inspirational fellow, gathered the Dirtbag players together and with great verve and emotion told them something like this: “Boys, you just saw your teammate Will Ernst come into the game and load the whole Dirtbag team up on his back, and carry us to victory. He did exactly what I have been talking about. I want every one of you to remember the look that Ernie had in his eye when he climbed the hill and I gave him the ball, and I want every one of you to have that same look in your eye when the game is on the line, when you have the chance to do something special for your team. And when we’re done here, I want every one of you to give Ernie a pat on the butt and to thank him for carrying the Dirtbags to victory!”
Wow. I think that I will forevermore get goose bumps whenever I think back about this game and Coach Sorensen’s impassioned post-game speech. I don’t know if Will or I will ever have a sports “high” together as high as this one (we can only hope), but even if we don’t, this one is forever seared into my memory bank, and no doubt into young Ernie’s as well. God bless you, Coach Sorensen, and God bless yourself, God.
To have two sons who both love baseball almost as much as their Old Man, and to have them both be pretty fair at the Greatest Game—much better than their raggedy-armed former catcher father—is something to treasure, and something for which I will be eternally grateful. There’s something special about fathers and sons and baseball, to be sure.
Thank you for indulging me on my rambling ruminations about Friday night past. I’ll try to keep the boasting and bragging to a tolerable limit in future editions of From the Bullpen.
Skipper
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