Playing with a Purpose

 

We left for Wausaw around 1130 on Monday and drove 2.5 hours there. We showed up extremely early because the bus needed work to be done on it, so typically we would go to a mall and hang out. I don’t know much about Wausau (if there is a mall there or we just didn’t look), but we ended up going to Gander Mountain, an outdoors store. North Carolina native, Zach White, checked out the hunting rifles, while other members walked around the giant store. I found a giant tent, pulled out a sleeping pad from a shelf nearby, and read, while others sat in chairs, kayaks, and slept in other tents. It took a good 10 minutes to round everyone up, but we made sure we had everyone before going to lunch.

We went to Burrachos, a burrito place, for lunch. I was so confused. This Burrachos looked IDENTICAL to a Chipotle. Everything in the interior (signs, tables, chairs, food, prices) looked exactly like those in Chipotle. It was weird, but since I like Chipotle, Burrachos hit the spot. In my last post I said our goal for the first game was to not “follow an off day with a day off,” but that’s exactly what we did. We didn’t pitch, hit, or field well, and the Woodchucks took Game 1 of the series. After the game, we got back on the bus and I sat there sending emails almost the entire way home. Jordan Owen (UT-Martin) listened to my iTunes the whole way back, and others got on Facebook or just slept. Having free wifi on the buses is a nice luxury of being on the Mallards and something I have never experienced. It would come in handy in the spring when you are riding back from a Tuesday night game and your paper is due at midnight, and then you have to sprint to the nearest computer lab to email it in two minutes before the deadline (I have never been in that situation…but it has happened to some of my friends).

I got home at 2, put in a load of laundry and went to bed. Today was bound to be a long day of baseball and I needed sleep. Today we had a doubleheader which was a make-up game for the rained out game the first week of June. To save some pitcher’s arms and to save time, we played two seven-inning games. BP started at 2, so I left the house at 1. The construction in downtown Madison was terrible today and it took 45 minutes to complete my usual 20 minute drive- good thing I left really early. The first game went by so fast, I now remember how quick high school games were. We lost Game 2, despite really good hitting by Jordan Owen. Going into the final game at home, we were down, but in order to win the first half, this game would be crucial. Michael Handel (Minnesota) crushed an RBI triple which put us on the board, and my teammate from school, Chris Lamb (Davidson), pitched pretty well for his first outing as a Mallard. The story of the game was in the bottom of the 7th (final inning), Justin Parr (Illinois) gets up with one out and hits a sky-scraping shot to right center to win the game! Coach was right when he said it takes some serious talent to hit a walk-off homerun, with the pressure and the fans and everything else, and Parr had it tonight. I was really happy for him- everyone on the team knows that Parr hits the most amount of linedrive outs on the team, so it was really nice to see him hit a 400 foot bomb that no one could catch.

Tomorrow we have some kind of camp with 500 kids at Warner Park in the morning. It will be a relatively early morning for me because the camp starts at 930, so I will get up at 830. The key phrase is that “early” is a relative term. More good news from tonight, first place Eau Claire lost, so I think we are only .5 games behind them with 7 games to go.

aB