BONUS BLOG: No Dust on These Cleats

Versus

I had circled this game on the calendar quite a while ago. 

Exactly a month ago, on June 22nd the Lucky Stiffs were sitting with a 9-1 record.  The next day the Dusty Cleats beat the Grisslies 15-13 to move to a 10-0 record on the year.  That was when I first looked ahead the schedule to see when these two would meet.  Apparently some other people did do.  Contrary to popular belief (or at least contrary to Dusty Cleats urban myths), neither I nor this BLOG predicted a Lucky Stiffs win.  I won't pretend that it would have made copy to see a two horse race to the wire, but there was nothing in print. 

At any rate, some pretty interesting things happened when these teams were within a game of one another.   One thing was that the high scoring and dominant Stiffs hit a bit of wall going going 1-3 over their next four games which dropped them into a congested second place mess.  And the Cleats had some struggles, but no losses.  Of the Dusty Cleats 14 wins coming into this week, 8 wins were by 3 runs or less and, unbelievably, six games were settled by just a single run.  It seems that some teams (Grisslies included) may have missed the best chance to end the undefeated season.

So we waited for the showdown and somewhere along the line the two teams got interested and had a little side "fund raiser" for HELP THE KIDS program, which is always a worthy and supportive cause.  And this is where this league and its participants show their true colours.  There were (est.) about 30-40 people there to watch the game and that was before the 20 players for the next game showed up. 

We witnessed what has become sort of a typical game for the Cleats.  They were ahead, not hugely, but ahead.  The Lucky Stiffs (like so many before) were never out of it, but couldn't get that crucial hit.  The game was 9-4 in the Stiffs last at bat in the bottom of the 7th and they loaded the bases with nobody out.  At that point, you gotta figure you're getting two runs FOR SURE and then you're only a hit from a tie game. 

Well, not so much.  A hard ground ball to Gord Robinson, who for sure going up to a #9 next year (maybe 8), resulted in a step on third and throw to the plate to choke off the run on nice double play.  Good for him, because you could see he was a little down after ONLY jacking one off the foul (fair) pole in the 1st inning. 

Gord Robinson when he was at AA in the

Seattle organization.

So the game ended 9-4 and big congrats to the Dusty Cleats who are now poised to run the table!  The real winners were the Help The Kids program.  The Cleats and Stiffs abandoned their initial bet and agreed to donate $100.00 from each team.  The Help The Kids organizing committee and executive (Chris Ross, Ed Hopkins and Jeff Dancey) stepped up to match the team contributions so this one game earned $400.00 for HTK!!!  Our overall tournament weekend garnered over $5000.00. 

Congratulation to the Lucky Stiffs and Dusty Cleats for staging a great show for a very worthy cause!

NOTE:

We're unlikely to see a Weakly Supplement this week as I'm dealing with a LapTop on life support.  I have a doctor looking at it tomorrow and HOPEFULLY I won't lose any BLOG, weakly supplement, or stats data that I'll need to rebuild.  I'm a little worried.