OSI 12 - The Great Escape 18

GLASTONBURY

For the second time this season Team OSI had the lead until their opponents’ last at bat, only to have it slip away like a jello-slick pig.

What hit hardest, though, was that somewhere inside Team OSI nervously thought that they just might win this game, that they had a chance. No one gave it full voice, no one stood up with a “We can do this!” speech, yet the feeling was in the air. There was hope.

But Fate is a heartless bastard and The Great Escape scored 7 runs in the bottom of the sixth to beat Open Solutions 18-12.

Still, Team OSI proved they could play. After falling behind in the first, they came back to take the lead in the second. After falling behind again, they took the lead again. And by the middle of the fourth, they were actually leading The Great Escape—the league’s first place team—by a score of 12-8.

The offensive was led by Mark Starybrat and Lynn Cecere who both went 3 for 3, and Patrick "Hit the Cutoff" Kelly who had 3 RBI. Mark had his second triple of the season and came within a side-step of the team’s first home run. That side-step would have meant that, as he rounded third, Mark would have avoided third base coach Tom Tartaro, that Mark wouldn’t have run headlong into him, and that instead of a home run, Mark wouldn’t have had to stagger back to third for a bone-rattled triple.

Fate again. The SOB.

But the heavy hitting of the first four innings vanished like a cold beer on the OSI bench—there one second, gone the next—and Team OSI didn’t score for the rest of the game. In the end, The Great Escape had just that: a great escape.

Yet even in the loss there was one winning moment. Open Solutions so frustrated the first place Great Escape by leading most of the game that the Great Escape fell to bickering and finger-pointing. It boiled until two of their players nearly came to blows after a botched play by the third baseman. “You should’ve tagged the runner,” the Team Captain told him. “You tell me how to play again and I’ll punch you face in,” the third baseman barked back. “Get outta here. You’re off the team.” And in a roar of obscenities, he was gone.

A few more innings of that and maybe more players would have been tossed. Maybe there would have been no one left to play. Maybe Open Solutions would have won by forfeit.

Maybe next time. But it’s all up to Fate.