Lomond Elementary School, Shaker Heights, Ohio (High school girls' softball #1)

 

If there's a ball and a bat involved, sign us up. Friday evening, we watched a high school girls' softball game. Scout Harvey of Shaker Heights has the best ERA in the Greater Cleveland Conference, and her father, Ralph, has been a friend of mine for decades. We invited Ralph and his family to the Cleveland game Sunday, so they invited us to Scout's game Friday. 

We've been seeing progressively smaller attendances throughout the week, over 30,000 in Wrigley last weekend, roughly 3000 in Toledo Thursday, and probably under 100 (of whom we may have been the only ones who weren't related to the players. And the field is just a field hacked into a grade school playground, with a mesh fence, although unlike Wrigley, it does have a scoreboard that shows the score to the people sitting behind home plate. 

It's the same game, but at a much different level, a slower pace, none of the diving catches, none of the instinctive knowledge of the game situation when things go wonky on the basepaths (which happens more often).

But it's still fun. Most of my exposure to softball has been at higher levels. The most softball I ever watched was when I had a lab that overlooked the field for the University of Arizona Wildcats in the 1990s, when they won the national championship more often than not. When I'd be running experiments that required waiting for 5 or 10 or 20 minutes for an instrument to take data, I'd pull my chair up to the window, and watch the drills they'd do. Kerry and I would go to a few of their games each year, and we went to one or two games when there was a professional women's team in Tucson one year. It's fascinating to compare the different levels of softball and baseball. The bottom line is that they all involve people, and half the stories are the stories of the people playing and coaching it, if you just know them.

The game: Shaker Heights 16, Beachwood 6, in 5 innings (10-run rule)

Scout gave up six runs in the first two innings, but I'm not sure any of them were "earned runs" (i.e., not involving errors). But Shaker Heights began hitting home runs. I have to say, the choreographed home run celebrations of MLB have nothing on the spontaneous celebration of a group of high school girls (with proud parents looking on).

Consistent with many of the games we've gone to this year, we did get rain. The umpires were clearly talking about calling the game after 4 innings, but didn't, and it didn't take too long to get to the run-rule margin in the 5th. That was good, because the grass and the balls were clearly getting slick.

 

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