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You may have heard the 2008 U.S. Olympic basketball team referred to as the "Redeem Team" for its mission to continue the legacy of its predecessor, the Dream Team, and "restore order to the universe" by bringing home a gold medal.

Well, last night RFT Softball fielded its own lowercase redeem team, defeating beer-league powerhouse BS Bar by a score of 5-3 a week after getting steamrolled by the BSers 22-2. The victory, however, doesn't bode well for the order of the universe, as it marks only the second time in three years of University City/Overland rec-league play that RFT managed to beat BS's soused sluggers.

The dream game was like a bizarro version of the nightmarish beatdown that preceded it seven days earlier. When BS led off with a lazy pop fly to left, the first out of the game came precisely twelve batters sooner than it did the week before.

Winning is never easy, the old cliché goes, but losing 22-2 in seven innings of softball is usually a pretty difficult accomplishment as well. It wasn't last night. The RFT softball team took it on the chin (and the back, and the hip, and the…you get the point) and made losing look easy against BS Bar and Grill at Lions Club Park on Woodson Road.

The setting sun and cold beer made for a perfect atmosphere in which one loud team could really care and the other team could be just happy to be there.

There were highlights:

Moving a pet to a new cage often seems impossible.

Anyone who has ever owned a parrot, for instance, has gone through the laborious process of assembling the new coop in front of the bird, setting it across the room so it can familiarized itself with it, then placing it alongside the rusty old confines and encouraging the bird to hop on its shiny new perch. The talking parrot, of course, refuses to budge and squawks "No effing way," just like its foul-mouthed owner would in such a situation.

So it was last night as RFT softball played its first game away from the friendly confines of Overland’s Legion Park, losing 9-5 to Grady’s Bar and falling to a 4-6 record the season.

Like a heaping helping of its signature appetizer Nachos Grande, Chevys Fresh Mex kept piling it on Monday night in a 17 to 8 drubbing of RFT at Legion Ballpark in Overland. Adding to the heartache -- and heartburn -- for the alt-weekly players was the knowledge that for much of the contest the game was theirs to lose.

With temperatures hovering in the upper 90s, RFT warmed up to a quick lead in the bottom of the first thanks to a two-RBI double from third sacker Chad Garrison. Chevys bounced back in the second inning to take a 4-2 lead before clutch batting on the parts of RFT outfielders Matt Underwood and Ray "Ray" Richardson reclaimed the lead 5-4. Chevys went on to tie the game 5-5 in the fifth.

Then came the feeding frenzy.

Rocco Landesman, Clayton High School Class of '65, has submitted a bid for the Chicago Cubs.

The big-time Broadway producer is one of the money men behind Mel Brooks' The Producers. Is this a Bialystockian attempt to gain even more money by investing in a guaranteed loser? Many Cardinals fans already equate the Cubs with the Third Reich (great success in the early going, followed by years of diminishing results, followed by a monstrous national shame and reluctance to acknowledge the past), so it's not a stretch.

"Springtime for Piniella," indeed.

-Unreal

In the 2005 cinematic masterpiece The Ringer, Johnny Knoxville plays a regular-guy jackass who tries to rig the Special Olympics by posing as a mentally disabled participant. Any movie made in such monumentally bad taste is right up Unreal's alley. That's why when both the RFT softball squad and its opponent, Grady's Bar, each debuted its own ringer last night, Unreal was delighted to see them do their best to re-enact the Knoxville classic.

But while it appeared at times that the game was in fact turning out to be that kind of special -- a Grady's player was sporting golf shoes on the softball diamond, and RFTers were tripping over first base as if it were a high hurdle -- in the end the RFT won 7-6 in extra innings thanks to some help from their ringer, a fill-in left fielder named Greg who was on loan from Chevy's Fresh Mex.

After a perfunctory RFT top of the first, Grady's jumped out to an early lead when a strapping left-handed slugger sporting a Lindenwood College Baseball T-shirt (who'd been conspicuously absent from earlier Grady's contests) swatted a home run in the bottom of the frame. Grady's tacked on a few more in the early innings, belting balls down the left-field line and blooping base hits up the middle. Meanwhile, their veteran hurler was stymieing the alt-weekly's offense with precisely located, high-arcing pitches.

Like a champion Special Olympics sprinter, however, the RFTers showed a strong kick as they approached the finish line.

Team RFT had a sniff of its old self last night. It smelled a lot like marijuana. Sticky, gooey, chronic marijuana.

Then again, perhaps that odor was just the fumes wafting over from the Macanudo-size blunt being passed around in the nearby parking lot. Whatever the case, the secondhand smoke seemed only to stoke RFT's lethargy Monday night and produce more than a few flashbacks to seasons when the team routinely suffered defeats by double-digit margins.

From the onset yesterday, it was clear that this was not the same club that just two weeks ago rallied for its greatest victory of the season. Hitless in the top of the first, RFT took the field only to watch Chevys Fresh Mex bat its way through the order on the way a quick eight runs. Chevys added to its tally in nearly every ensuing inning and led 22-3 going into the final frame.

While Chevys' bats were finding a Jarlsberg wheel's worth of holes between RFT fielders, it was all RFT could do to not hit the ball directly into the gloves of its opponents. Chevys' man-mountain of a pitcher recorded so many 1-3 putouts that several RFT players questioned whether his girth wasn't exterting some type of gravitational pull on the ball.

As he does so often, Tom "Sox" Kavanaugh scored the first runs for the good guys, with a three-run blast over the fence in center field. Chris Schaeffer proved once again that the proper mixture of human-growth hormone and Busch beer can work wonders; the outfielder had another big day, going three-for-three at the plate and ably scooping up two flyouts to right-center.

Plays of the day, though, have to go to Ray "Ray" Richardson and Cathleen "Coach Cat" Joffray, who hit back-to-back, inside-the-infield home runs in the seventh.

Those "hits" brought the final score to 22-5 and left RFT with a 3-4 record on the season.

The team can only hope that next week's party in the parking lot will feature a more stimulating intoxicant -- say crack or meth. This team could use the pick-me-up.

-Unreal

The addition of ace pitcher and RFT circulation manager Kevin Powers wasn't enough to ensure victory last night in a tightly contested game versus Chevy's Fresh Mex.

Powers -- whose prowess in beer-related sports is comparable to Bo Jackson's onetime dominance of real athletics -- missed the first three games of the season to conclude his Monday-night dart league campaign. The postponed start had little to no adverse effect on his pitching. Powers struck out the side in the fifth inning and recorded a whopping seven Ks over nine innings.

After a rainout last week, the RFT's softball season resumed last night with spectacular results. Yes, you read that correctly, after getting shut out and shat on in the opening game of the season, the home team emerged victorious from a 15-14 roller coaster ride of a game last night at Legion Park in Overland.

After holding opponents Chevy's Fresh Mex scoreless in the top of the first, newcomer Andrew Ciembronowicz led off the bottom of the first with a base hit, followed by another hit, and a ground-out. MVP SS/LF/Superhuman Tom Kavanaugh then stepped to the plate and ripped a double, scoring what many no doubt thought would be the first and only runs of the season. Amazingly though, like Barry Manilow's career, the hits just kept on coming. Buoyed by some hustle base running, excellent pitch selection, poor fielding by Chevy's, and some actual honest to goodness hits, the RFT eventually batted a round in the first inning, scoring eight runs in all. Though the opposing pitcher was talking on his cell phone during two at-bats, giving directions to a lost teammate, no call to the bullpen was made.

Just sayin'.

-Unreal

A recent post on Deadspin.com addresses rumors that Jim Edmonds might sign with the Chicago Cubs.

Not surprisingly, Deadspin founder Will Leitch blanches at the mere thought -- though fortunately, as he points out, Cubs fans do too.

Anyhoo, commenting on Leitch's kicker -- "By the way, this move is probably not good business for Edmonds' new restaurant/nightclub in St. Louis" -- one Deadspin reader writes:

...Edmonds' new restaurant/nightclub in St. Louis.

I've been there. It's a dive.

/rimshot

If that's a result of Deadspin "Comment Ombudsman" Rob Iracane's call for commenters to "Don't be cruel without also being funny," then Unreal's all for it.

-Unreal

While the hometown heroes the St. Louis Cardinals opened their 162-game season weeks ago, last night a slightly lesser-known local squad took the field for the first time all year. And to Unreal, "local" means that the players sit in adjacent cubicles. That's right, yesterday was opening day for the RFT's slow-pitch softball team.

But while the Redbirds were able to dispatch the defending National League champs last night thanks to some heads-up hustle from their MVP slugger, the RFTers were not so fortunate, falling to U. City rec league titans BS Bar by a score that was tallied at "At least 16-0." The box score reveals the impressive magnitude of the defeat, as BS Bar led in such categories as home runs, hits, fielding percentage, total bases, and, perhaps most frustrating for the alt-weekly lineup fresh off a Cinco de Drinko bender, alcohol consumed. After watching the game, a representative from Chico's Bail Bonds immediately offered to sponsor the RFT squad.

The award for player of the game goes to staff writer/pitcher Chad Garrison, who, flush with confidence after conquering the St. Louis real estate market, struck out three while walking just one in four innings of work. While his ERA is inflated after allowing sixteen runs, including an emblematic home run on the first pitch of the season, the blogosphere is already touting his low WHIP and xFIP numbers as more telling of his abilities. If you're in a deep fantasy league, he could be a good waiver pickup.

Check back every Tuesday this summer to see if the RFT will be able to improve on its opening-day showing. Next week's goal: advancing a runner past first base.

-Unreal

If Jeff Gordon can do it, why can't Unreal?

3:54 p.m.: Having arrived fashionably late -- Unreal is nothing if not fashionable -- we found our spot in the nosebleed section of the press box just in time to see Rick Ankiel put the Cards on the board with a bases-loaded double down the right-field line. A single by Official 2008 whipping boy Cesar Izturis plated two more, and the Birds erased a 1-0 deficit to take command 4-1.

More as events warrant.

3:58 p.m.: Make that 5-1 Cardinals. Bottom of the second. Albert Pujols just now jacked a 1-1 pitch 385 feet into the vistors' bullpen.

4:01 p.m.: Bottom of the second. It's raining a little.

4:07 p.m.: Just noticed who's sitting next to us. Jeff Gordon! Dueling live bloggers!

4:16 p.m.: Bottom of the third. Izturis draws a walk. It's raining. Like hell! Here comes the tarp.