Only In Baseball (Softball Too)

For as much as we love it, baseball and softball has a tendency to drive us a little batty. It keeps us on our toes. And no matter how many games you go to, there is always something new.

Sunday held a number of first for me, both on the baseball and softball side. That contributes to a already crazy weekend with games moved to The Dalles and Tri-Cities.

Here's what made Sunday even more unique...
• Sunday's softball head was "winded out." Yes, you read that right. After one batter this afternoon, the Pacific and UPS coaches and umpires decided that the sustained 35 MPH winds in Pasco (gusts of 40-50 MPH) was too much. So...games called on account.

• I have never umpired a game, but today I called a batter out. In the eighth inning on the first game against Whitworth, the plate umpire missed a swinging strike by Nate Rasmussen on a first pitch steal attempt by Andy Tolbert (Tolbert was called out). We post the strike, but after the next pitch the umpires signals one ball, one strike. After the second strike, Whitworth's coach comes out to argue that ball one was actually a strike.

After a minute, the umpire looks up to me and asks what the first pitch was. He couldn't hear me yell strike, so I raise my arm, fist clinched, signaling the strike. Essentially, I called Rasmussen out. Sorry Nate.

• In the fourth inning of our second baseball game, a prevailing west wind of 30 miles per hour pushed three homers out for the Boxers. Rasmussen, Nick McNeely and Corby Makin all hit back-to-back-to-back solo shots over the left center field wall. It is an amazing sight to see three go out in a row.

Not to be outdone, Whitworth's Mitch Ramsay clubbed a home run to the same spot in the fifth. ramsay's, however, bounces off the road behind the left field wall, take a high bounce and rolls over the roof of a nearby house.

• At one point of game two, it was rainy and gray on the first base side of the open-air press box and sunny and dry on the third base side.

Only in baseball...and softball.

Let's Play Three

As much as "Mr. Cub" Ernie Banks liked to say "Let's play two," I am sure he would shudder at the thought of three baseball games in one day.

For Pacific baseball, the tripleheader is seemingly becoming a regular occurrence. On Saturday (Feb. 14), the Boxers played three against Pomona-Pitzer. The Boxers won game one by a 3-0 score before dropping game two 10-3 and game three 3-0. All three games were seven innings.

The tripleheader was the second between the Boxers and Sagehens in as many years. That itself is unique, as is the thought of traveling from the Pacific Northwest to have games rained out in Southern California two consecutive years.

Add to the ledger Pacific's 2005 tripleheader against Puget Sound, and you could have a very unique spot in the annals of baseball for the Boxers.

Like almost everything else in baseball, someone has researched tripleheaders. That man is Phil Lowry, a member of the Society for American Baseball Research in Pennsylvania and the author of the highly acclaimed book Green Cathedrals. Along with researching the past of baseball's stadiums, he continues to research marathon games of 20 innings or more and tripleheaders at all levels of the game.

After last year's tripleheader against Pomona-Pitzer, Pacific became just the second school in collegiate baseball history to have played in two tripleheaders, according to Lowry's research. The other school was Ohio State, who engaged in tripleheaders against Northwestern and Purdue in 2002. To that date, Lowry had only uncovered 23 in the history of collegiate baseball. The majority of those had come over the last 10 years, owing to the ever expanding schedules at all levels and the urgency put upon coaches to get as many games as they can in.

That last fact may mean that there are more schools out there who have played two or every three tripleheaders, especially with as rainy as many parts of the nation can get during the spring. Hopfully Mr. Lowry's research has turned up more examples to lend credence to Pacific's marathon claim.

Either way, three games in a day is sure to tax a player's fitness. Six Pacific players, Joey Pulito, Keith Suits, Jereamy Probert, Kaeo Lau Hee, Nate Rasmussen and Brandon Kon, started in and played in all three games. Thankfully, the Boxers needed to use only five pitchers. We'll need the arms when the conference season gets underway in two weeks.