In a famous Nike commercial, pitching greats Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux, jealous of Mark McGwire’s batting scores, abandon the mound and try to hone their skills at the plate. After many desperate attempts, they finally hit one out of the park. During a congratulatory high-five, they concluded that “chicks dig the long ball.”
Perhaps Glavine and Maddux would have revised this conclusion if they had attended the Varsity Blues’ season opener last Thursday in Scarborough. The game against the Laurier Golden Hawks proved that in baseball, it’s not the long ball but the little things that count.
“It was a very unusual game,” said Blues’ head coach Dan Lang after his team’s 10-4 loss to the Golden Hawks. “Sometimes [by looking at the score] you can really figure out what kind of game it was—but not this one.”
Things got unusual beginning in the third on an offensive interference by Laurier catcher Chris Pittaway. After a single by first basemen, Curtis Young, baserunner Pittaway collided with a Blues’ fielder and was called out at second.
The next inning saw another rare interference when Laurier’s Andrew Stevens was hit with a batted ball while running from first to second.
“You know, if you came to every game for five years you wouldn’t see that again,” Coach Lang said of the multiple interferences. Yet these interferences proved meaningless as the game remained scoreless into the 6th—when things began to get really wild.
The 6th inning saw Toronto put a dent in the scoreboard by gaining three runs against the Golden Hawks. However, like the rest of the game, there was nothing typical about the way the runs were scored.
After a series of walks and hits by pitches, Toronto loaded the bases. With Phillip McColl at bat for the Blues, the first two runs of the inning were scored on consecutive wild pitches. The third run was scored by Blues’ star outfielder Pat Janssen after McColl reached first on an error by Laurier’s second baseman Scott Mahn.
These fielding and pitching errors meant that while Toronto was up by three runs, they still had no RBIs to show for it.
Janssen ended Toronto’s hitting futility in the 8th inning with an RBI single after a lead-off walk by Chris Papalia and a double by Chris Dahiroc. However, this fourth and final run for the Blues came too late as Laurier had taken the lead after scoring seven runs in the top half of the inning.
While the Blues’ Nick Cunjak, pitching in relief, got the loss and gave up four earned runs, Coach Lang was quick to defend his talented pitching staff. “We got six innings, scoreless pitching, that’s got to say something…and then when [Laurier] started scoring runs it was on really odd things,” he said. “[For example,] we had these two little balls in the infield, hit off the end of the bat—they only hit the ball about 20 feet. The pitchers were doing very, very well—it’s just hard balls to get to.”
Coach Lang insisted that he doesn’t want the game’s oddities and the 10-4 loss to affect his team. “The first thing to tell [the team] is to put this game behind them.”
However, the Blues will still take something away. With the interferences, the wild pitches, and the pesky little hits by Laurier, the Blues will stop “digging the long ball” and focus on the small things. In preparation for the rest of the season, Coach Lang said, “We won’t bat at all [next practice]. What we’re going to do is field bunts. [We need to learn] what we’re going to do about these short balls. We’re going to spend two hours working on those little things.”
Look for the Blues to perfect their game when they head to St. Catharines to battle the Brock Badgers on Sept 9.
