The Streak: Days 5-9

By Kelly:

Continued from The Streak: Days 1-4

If there was ever any question about how I feel about baseball I hope this changes that. Over a 16 day period in July I spent every day at different ballparks between watching as a spectator, playing slow-pitch softball men’s and coed and umping slow-pitch softball. Here’s a recap of those 16 days.

Day 5 Monday July 15: Over these next 4 days I spent umpiring in my town I live in, Longview, WA. Tonight was a coed night and I had to do Division 3 which is the lowest and can be extremely painful sometimes but on this night everything went smoothly.

Round trip: 8 miles

Day 6 Tuesday July 16: This was a men’s night and what was different about this night was that instead of umping 2 games like usual I had to do 4 games, 6:10, 7:20, 8:30 and 9:40 so I didn’t get home until a little after 11:00. The first 2 games were upper division and the second 2 games were lower. My games stayed on time and had no problems.

Round Trip: 8 miles

Day 7 Wednesday July 17: Back to coed on this night and middle division which is a little better then lower depending on the teams that are playing. Once again everything went smooth and didn’t have any problems. It’s in lower coed were I usually have the most problems. Almost every team has a guy that is an “All-Star” and they know everything but in reality they don’t know as much as they think they do. We call them “Coed King”.

Round Trip: 8 miles

Day 8 Thursday July 18: Once again I had to do a double-double for men’s which meant me not getting home till after 11:00 again. This was probably one of the easier weeks of umping outside of the fact that I did 12 games in 4 nights. I will say this about these 4 games. I rang up more guys watching strike 3 then I had the entire year. I want to say I rang up at least 6 guys and of course none of them were the right call. No one got really upset with me. Come on guys it’s under hand slow-pitch softball and you have 2 strikes, SWING THE BAT!!!!!

Round Trip: 8 miles

Day 9 Friday July 19: Finally I didn’t have to ump and I got to play with my coed team. We won the 1^st game pretty convincingly and lost the 2^nd game in the 7^th. That put our record at 9-3 in 2^nd place.

Round Trip: 8 miles

These 5 days I was lucky and didn’t have to leave town and only traveled 40 miles bringing my travel miles to 758 over the 1^st 9 days.