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.