AUGUSTA – Piiiiiiiiing. Whap! THUMP.
Piiiiiiiiing. Whap! THUMP.
Piiiiiiiiing. Whap! THUMP.
Piiiiiiiiing. Oh, please don’t dare say you’re annoyed, even irritated. Toughen up and take one for the team, already.
After all, you weren’t the quarantined baseball player dealing with the daily drudgery of pretending a 4-by-4-foot strip of the basketball baseline was the batter’s box and spraying one squishy, soft-toss ball after another into a suspended, 20-foot-high tarpaulin.
You weren’t the excessively rested ace hearing the two dirtiest words in the pitcher’s lexicon, “simulated game,” day after day after dreary, drizzly, detestable, dadgummed day.
And you weren’t the skipper charged with keeping a baker’s dozen teenagers, five of them already high school graduates, borderline intrigued by a repertoire of practice activities less enthralling than full-contact Parcheesi or a Women’s Temperance Union poetry reading.
“We took cuts in the cage after school,” said Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School catcher Russell Estes. “That’s pretty much all we could do. It felt like it was just swing, swing, all day long. I must have taken a hundred cuts a day.”
Maybe there’s something to be said for muscle memory. Maybe the Vikings were mad as Rottweilers on a red meat fast, or transcendently giddy to be outside, or both.
Whatever the cause, the effect wrought by eight full days of rain-mandated respite (nine, if you throw out the calendar and count consecutive, 24-hour periods) was no effect at all on Oxford Hills.
Estes ripped a grand slam. Kelvin Decato unleashed the aluminum on four belt-high offerings which, without walls to contain them, turned into three singles, a double and four RBIs. Matt McDonnell singled twice and knocked in a pair.
Oxford Hills out-slugged Edward Little 13-8 to wrap up the Regional Championship Game Mother Nature Forgot at Morton Field on Monday evening.
One week without bad hops, bus rides or bug bites never felt so good.
“We went back to preseason,” said Oxford Hills coach Shane Slicer, the unwitting conductor of this successful sports psychology experiment. “I give the boys credit. They had to be up and down every day.”
Sure, keeping that level swing somewhere on the business side of mud season form was a marvelous accomplishment. But hitting, as Jose Canseco taught us, is a small part of the pastime.
It would have been wholly forgivable if the Vikings buckled under the glare of real, honest-to-goodness chalk lines and lost by the slow-pitch softball score of 23-21. But somewhere in the interminable doldrums of all that indoor recess, Slicer and his gym dandies kept the fun in fundamentals.
The Vikings dropped a few National League interludes into their hit parade. Chris Jennings and Derek Varney scuttled to first base on dropped third strikes. Heck, Jennings had so much fun kicking up water-logged dirt that he raced all the way to second.
Oxford Hills stole four bases, primarily by staying cognizant of the count and reading pitchers’ leg kicks. Equally watchful at the plate, the Vikings drew seven walks.
Starting pitcher McDonnell and fireman Corey Saunders, who inherited an inferno after EL scored three runs in the fourth and four in the fifth to reduce a double-digit disparity to a manageable 11-8 deficit, combined to strand a dozen Red Eddies on base.
“I hadn’t pitched since the quarterfinals against Skowhegan,” said Saunders, who half-laughed, half-winced when somebody reminded him that was June 9. “Every day was the exact same thing. We’d try to go outside, but the ground was so soaked that we couldn’t really do anything.”
Westbrook is next, today, same time, same location. Twilight forecast for the state final: Hazy and humid, with a chance of (long, slow inhale) scattered afternoon thundershowers.
Saunders doesn’t even want to think about it.
“It’ll be good to get right back here and play again,” he said. “We’ll be ready.”
The hard part will be getting a good night’s sleep, but it has nothing to do with nerves. It’s those dreams being punctuated by piiiiiiiiings. And whaps. And thumps.
Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is koakes@sunjournal.com.
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