Well... hope everybody arrived back safely from The Novara Vampire Mosquito
and Annoying Small Fly FastPitch Tournament. The anti-bug repellant companies must make a fortune in that part of Italy. Too many rice paddies I guess.. but Italians gotta have their risotto. If the penalty is only a few mosquito bites which leave a welt the size of home plate (just ask Jackie and Caroline).. I guess that it is a small price to pay. I did notice that mothers were chaining their children to the tables between 20:30 and 22:00 to prevent abduction by the extra thirsty mossies.

We did pretty well coming in third. How the organizers came up with that calculation nobody really knows. I think they had to feed it into the NASA computer grid to have the position determined right at ceremony time. With just a couple of breaks over the weekend we coulda been in the finals too.. but, that's the game. It really is a game of inches you know.

Once again, I have to write this from memory so no doubt there will be distortions and hilites missed. Feel free to correct, roast, toast or add comments if you want. Next tournament Coach Peter will be fined 2 kegs of beer and have to sleep with Rado in a Fiat 500 for 2 nites if he does not show up with a scorebook. With my fading brain cells, the scorebook is the only way to recap the offensive (or lack of) hilites of the weekend.

On the offense, Rob was a hitting machine on Saturday. He kept hitting the ball out of the park one way or another and capped it all off with a grandslammer. On Sunday, Rado also smacked a 4 bagger with the bases loaded to break open a close game. Jamie kept using his magic bat to thread the ball out between 1st and 2nd base. Peter had some solid hits and even ol Reg had a few too.

Our ladies did very well at the bat too.  What I admired most was that, even though some of the pitching was a bit faster than usual, they were swinging at very few bad pitches and drawing walks on 3-1 and 3-2 counts. Not only beautiful eyes but sharp eyes. The other pitchers did not ease up for our ladies (like our pitching did) and it won't be long before our ladies will be swatting those guys all over, no matter what they throw.

We had an outstanding pitching performance from Rado this weekend. A lotta K's. We outfielders were seriously considering setting up a beer tent in center field to keep in the shade while he struck out the side or fielded a couple of 1 hoppers. Still tough to win though if you have to pitch a shutout to get a tie.

Our all lady infield on Sunday morning looked like a million bucks (oops euros). Laure was snagging pop foul balls and catching everything thrown at her, Jackie was scooping up grounders (one had an elusive handle on it),  Magali made all outs hit her way and Daniella (sp) gunned down anybody that was able to hit it towards 3rd. Another ho-hum game in the outfield. the infield did it all behind Peter.

And for the play of the weekend.. it once again involved a sliding person (not Magali this time).. the slide of the weekend award goes to Laure who was robbed by the umpire after making a fantastic slide (and in shorts too) into 3rd. I'm not sure what base he was watching but if she had been any more under the tag, she would have been under the bag too. She musta scraped about 3 cm off the surface of the field.

The umpiring was sure weird in a few of those games. The rules seemed to be a bit flexible to say the least, especially for the baserunners.

On a more serious note, rumor (there it is again.. a rumor every tournament) has it that the organizers had to put in a special order to the beer supplier because of the late nite (early morning) consumption by our team. I can't imagine who those people were but I heard that it covered all age groups and it was a mixed team also.

The beer was given a 4.9 star (only CZ beer can get a true 5.0) rating by our special panel of judges on Friday evening (or should I say Sat morning ). Believe you me, the panel consisted of a very qualified group of experts especially transported into Novara for the occasion, as we wanted to ensure that the beer was safe to drink for the rest of the team during the tournament. This led to an increase in panel size on Sat/Sun nite I noticed. The midnite closing time for the tap seemed to also be pretty flexible.. may be even more so than the softball rules permitting the panel judges to play extra innings and not have the game called after 4 beers without the tap being dry. Of course, the judges all made the strict curfew once more strongly enforced by Coach Peter and Rado.

There was a small scare in Novara overnite due to the local earthquake early warning station reporting a 5.6 tremor with the epi-center in the vicinity of a large tent at the ball bark. A team of experts quickly determined that it was caused by one of our team members making strange noises while sleeping. As well, this scare led to several plots being hatched to transport said sleeping member to a distant rice paddy in the middle of the nite and dump him there until morning. Fortunately, common sense prevailed and all such plots were abandoned. Some cars then became overnite sleeping accomodation.

Well, I've gone on long enough. Now for the Coach's comments or roastings. For my part, I really enjoyed the weekend. It was a real pleasure to play with all of you and I certainly look forward to the next time. Just wish the shoulder would recover like it used to do 26 years ago so that I could give Rado a bit more help.

Reg

The coaches' comments:

We again want to thank all the Die Hards for their performance during the weekend because playing ( and exhausting all the beer there) with 9 players in 5 games was tough.

From the coaches' point of view the travelling this time was a bit more sophisticated. Me (Rado) driving from Geneva has first shown the extra navigation skills to Magali and Caroline, showing them the most hidden parts of Petit Saconnex while explaining them this is a short-cut to the highway towards the tunnel Mont Blanc. Just to remind you we started at the Cornavin station.

At the destination in Novara I managed to enter it twice but then I apparently felt the smell of the beer jars or something because suddenly I turned our car to some gellateria where we could ask for a help. We were 3 minutes drive from the ball park :-)

We have especially enjoyed the very "cool" voyage thanks to the broken air-conditioning in the GOLDEN ARROW (broke 5 minutes after Peter left his place).

That said, you can imagine what was happening in the ball park bar after our arrival...

We have to award a special prize, the "Gold Beer Jar", to the Reg & Jamie for their incredible night performance. Sir Reg managed always to amuse Magali by his serenatas de la noce after the voice tuning beer setup. Sir James managed to drag all the ladies moving around him even he's not sure there have been any.
I cite him:

"... because actually one of my most pleasant memories ("memories" of Saturday night being a relative term...)
of the entire weekend was that evening, just sitting and talking and laughing. I'm not entirely sure