RFT Softball: A Season Ends As It Began
Outfielder Matt "Underwood" perhaps said it best following RFT's staggering 18-3 loss to BS Bar last night at Overland Field.
Unfortunately for RFT, the BS crew was decidedly sober as the teams squared off in the first playoff round Monday night. Two weeks earlier a sluggish BS squad arrived in Overland armed with copious quantities of gin buckets and proceeded to allow the alt-weekly ballers to squeak out a narrow 5-3 win against their soused adversaries. Last night BS came equipped with one solitary case of Natural Light -- an elixir that may as well be Gatorade to the perennial beer-league champs whose BA is exceeded only by their BAC.
After a fifteen-minute delay owing to thunderstorms and an honest-to-God tornado siren, RFT took the field without ace pitcher Kevin Powers, who reportedly stepped onto the "veranda" of his University City home earlier in the evening to wisely -- but wrongly -- conclude that the contest had been postponed.
Stepping in for the RFT ace was backup hurler Chad Garrison, who started the RFT season with a 2-1 record before making way for the dominant Powers. It was Garrison -- you may recall -- who served up a 22-0 loss at the hands of BS to start the season in May. The result Monday night would not be much different, although RFT was able to put a few runs on the board.
After holding BS to three tallies in the first inning, the newspaper's haphazard defense could do little to stop the onslaught as the opponents crushed repeated moon shots into the outfield gaps or -- as was often the case -- into RFT's Teflon-coated gloves. (One notable exception was Tom "Tall" Kavanaugh, whose incredible over-the-shoulder grab to rob a BS slugger of a guaranteed home run provided a bright spot late in the game.)
All in all, though, the game was a collective loss for RFT -- as it should be. A team that finally found a way to pull together and win this year reminded us Monday that where it truly exceeds expectations is in losing.
As we say at the end of each season: There's always next year.
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