We Are The Champions

...of the world. Or at least of the Underdog summer co-ed league in Bellevue.

We took the field on a sweltering July day - a day so hot that every pitch looked like a knuckle ball because of the heat waves rising from the field. A day so hot that the experts said only mad men and Englishmen would be out doors in this weather. A day so hot that, well, you get the idea. We put our 7-0 record on the line in the first game of the playoffs and crushed an unsuspecting Dunder Mifflin team by a score of something to something less. In all actuality, it wasn't that much of a blowout, I think the score was something in the neighborhood of 14-4. The real point is that we'd been running around in the sun for an hour and a half by the time the championship game rolled around and we had to line up against a formidable Hit It & Quit It team that had played earlier in the day and then gone off to sit and rest somewhere cool.

Hit It is genuinely a good team and we had handed them their only loss about a month ago in a close 9-4 game. But this time we had to contend not only with the weather and fatigue, but also the fact that our star power hitter's whereabouts are still unknown as he continues to evade police on drug charges. No, wait, he's on vacation, sorry about the mix up. We dodged a bullet in the first inning when they loaded the bases with nobody out, but taking a page out of the Mariner's playbook, they popped up and then hit into a double play - a double play in which I picked up a ball hit to short and tried to swipe my foot across second before throwing the runner out at first but will admit that I missed second. It was close enough that the ump called it out though. That set the pace for what was to be a low scoring affair. Fast forward to the bottom of the 7th when after trailing all game, we had closed the gap to 7-6. Sparing you the play by play, let me just say that with 2 outs, playoff MVP Ted (top middle) stepped to the plate with 2 outs and 2 on and hit a pop up foul that was just out of reach of the 3rd baseman. Unhappy with that he decided to take his second chance at glory and hit a hard line drive into the gap to bring in the winning run, giving us an 8-7 victory and some fancy championship shirts. The shirts were long overdue and it feels pretty good to finally get one. Good job team.