Capital City Cardinals are the 2010 Big East Challenge Champions!

The Capital City Cardinals won the Championship game in a 4 inning mercy rule beating the Carolina Falcons 24-2. The Falcons were probably favorites going into the game having beat us 17-15 in the first game of the day and went undefeated in pool play also beating the Big Cats. We had to pay the Big Cats in pool play and then to see who would play in the Championship game and won both games 27-8 and then 17-2. The Championship game was our 4th of the day. Although our boys had to have been tired from all the baseball they played, the extra game time increased their sharpness on defense and got their bats going at full throttle. Our first game of the day against the Cardinals was one to forget as we seriously looked like we could not make a play. We seem to be a team that transforms itself from night to day from the 1st to the 2nd game as this is what happened in our last tournament in Rocky Mount. We came back and won the final by an amazing score of 24-2. Wow.

The Cardinals can enjoy their 1st tournament Championship. We were not content to get the 2nd place trophy last night and played like it. Some of our players made incredible improvement in hitting and defense in this tournament like Will Thistle and Petyon Bloom. Everyone on our team hit the ball well this weekend and contributed in major ways. I truly believe that many of our players still have not reached their full potential even though we played this well in this tournament. We are all enjoying this victory and all the difficulties of getting this select team together all seems worth it when you see our kids coming together like this and enjoying the game of baseball and putting their abilities to use to help their team play well. I am so proud of them for playing so well. Congratulations Cardinals and for each and every person who contributed to make this a great success! What a fun time we had.

Capital City Cardinals are ORSS/TOP GUN All star invitationals runner up

The Capital City Cardinals take 2nd place after losing to the Rocky Mountain All=stars in the championship game 13-9.

The Cardinals were winning 7-2 in the top of the 2nd before the Rocky Mountain All-stars mounted their comeback and held the cardinals from having a big rally.

The umpire mentioned several times to the Cardinal coaches about our outstanding defense and said at one time that the cardinal were the best defensive team he had seen in years.

The Cardinals beat the Greene County All-stars 17-2 and the AFG All-stars 13-4 before playing in the Championship game.

Great job Cardinals at winning the runner up trophies in your 2nd tournament.

Eastern NC State Tournament July 12-13

The Capital City Cardinals after two weeks of practices as a team, entered our first ever tournament and played our first game ever against the #1 team in the State and #10 in the country, the Carolina Mustangs. We kept them to 2 runs an inning for only 8 runs and were complimented by their coach on our defense after the game. Unfortunately, our bats were completely silent as we had only 4 hits the entire game. We were David versus Goliath, playing a team who had a record of 56-5 and 20-4 against 9u teams going into the state tournament according to their website. They had clubs that had barrels twice as big around as our bats and used machines to pitch perfect strikes while the team relied on me, their coach to throw strikes for them to hit. The machines would pitch fast but these kids were timed into these machines and swing at the same spot and hit the ball hard. Our outfield was rock solid though and caught everything hit to them and our infield showed up as well to limit this team to 8 runs. Our offense wasn't able to do much and the Mustangs defense made every play look easy so we ended the game 8-0 because of a weird USSSA tournament rule that if a team is leading by 8 runs after 4 innings, the game is over. We had two outs before allowing the 8th run to come in but the game was over in 45 minutes and all but 2 batters on our team got to bat only once. The Mustangs went 2-0 to win the tournament and didn't allow a run. The other game they won 15-0 in a 3 inning game. The next game against the Kernersville Warriors was a combination of errors and good hitting from the Warriors that led to a lackluster 20-2 loss on our part though we were very happy to score our first runs in the last inning. We ran ourselves out of more possibilities to end a rally in a inning ending double play for the 2nd game in a row. Then we played another Cardinal team, the Pilot Mountain Cardinals, to see who were the best Cardinal team. Fortunately our players had never seen the Andy Griffith Show to know how humiliating it would be to get beat by a team from Mount Pilot. I can still hear Jim Nabors saying "Mount Pilot". Well they beat us 14-4. We did finally start hitting like we are capable of but then ran ourselves out of a rally getting thrown out at third by "Mount Pilot". We did qualify for the consolation game was against the High Point Yak, a team that fared only slightly better than us except for their 15-0 3 inning mercy beating from the Carolina Mustangs. This game was canceled though due to the rain. It was a fun weekend though and our team became closer as friends and we learned alot about the kind of baseball these travel teams play. We will go back to practice next week with a whole new set of things to work on for our next tournament next weekend, The Reebok Invitational.