The last night of kickball for the Kansas City division was last night. My team, Fingerbang, made it to the semi-final round and we had to play our "arch rivals" Shake N' Bake. The game went pretty smoothly, all things considered. Our offensive game sucked, as usual, so we had a hard time scoring those precious runs. We wound up losing the game 3-2 in the 7th inning (2nd extra inning).

Here's the recap of that game that I wrote for the newsletter:

Ideally, we thought we would win this game and move on to play El Guapo in the championship game. While we didn’t believe that Shake N’ Bake would roll over and we’d have an easy time with them, we did think we had the upper hand since we beat them in our last encounter.

Needless to say, our ideal situation did not come to fruition.

SNB picked up one run in the first inning but we came back to match them at the bottom of the first. Neither team was able to pick up any more runs for the rest of the game, although we did have several opportunities to bring in the winning run, particularly with a bases loaded and only one out situation. Unfortunately the pressure got the better of our kickers and we weren’t able to convert on those much-needed runs.

Because of the tie, the game went in to two extra innings. Both teams traded a run in the 6th inning but SNB picked up an unanswered run in the 7th to win the game.

All in all, the competitive portion of the game was awesome. Unfortunately, the sportsmanship aspect was awful considering that SNB really solidified their position as The Team That No One Likes with their incessant trash talking through the entire game. Seriously, you guys should join a softball league if you want to act like a bunch of classless d-bags.

Also, no thanks to the jerks on the other baseball field that turned off the lights. It’s not like we needed them or anything.

Finally, big thanks to Team Awesome for providing not 2, not 3, but 4 umpires for the game. We know you didn’t have to come out to the fields, so big thanks for going the extra mile to make things run smoothly.

Shake N' Bake went on to play El Guapo in the finals, where they lost 3-2. I was obviously pulling for El Guapo to win since 1. I am playing for them next season and 2. I like them more than I like Shake N' Bake.

While I am sad that kickball is over, I'm happy that this season is finished. It started to get really cold at night over the last few weeks and it really wasn't fun playing outdoors while wearing 4 layers of clothing. We'll get started up again in the spring, probably April, and hopefully we won't get rained out for 5 weeks like the division did this year.