Softball


Warning: Undefined variable $category_id in /home/juanmonr/juanomatic.net/wp-content/themes/monroy2014/category.php on line 7

Ball Buster Margarita

Here’s a margarita I made for the Ball Busters team-building party last night. It was a hit. I wanted to use blueberries and basil from the Union Square farmers’ market, but I had run low on time and relied on the local supermarket instead. (Ironically, the basil and blueberries were significanlty less expensive at the greenmarket than at the supermarket when I went to check today. Go figure.)

Making the margarita requires two steps.

Sweet-Sour Mix

  • 12 ounces of fresh lime juice
  • 10 ounces of fresh lemon juice
  • 10 ounces of sugar

Combine and heat lemon and lime juice in a saucepan and add sugar. Stir until sugar dissolves. Pour into a quart-sized mason jar (or something similar). Refrigerate until cool.

Margarita

  • 4 ounces of sweet-sour mix
  • 3 ounces of silver tequila
  • 1 ½ ounces of triple sec
  • 6 basil leaves
  • 8 blueberries
  • 1 ounce of agave nectar

Add sweet-sour mix, basil, and blueberries in a cocktail shaker and muddle ingredients together until you’ve “squished” all of the berries. Add tequila, triple sec, agave nectar and ice to the shaker. Shake together. Pour into a twelve-ounce glass filled with crushed ice.

Garnish glass with a couple of blueberries and a single basil leaf.

Softball Week 2: Explosive Wednesday Game, Nothing on the Weekend

Ramblers vs. G00nies

The Ramblers are a team I played with last fall, and I even shot some photos of them during their last game. I signed up for the spring/summer team, and I won a spot in the pitching rotation. We played two games on Wednesday night at Whitey Ford field, in the north-west tip of Astoria, Queens, and won two games, each by a ten-rule mercy-rule margin.

This team has some really strong hitters. They’re not necessarily going to hit balls into the East River, but they hit hard line drives. Everyone in field is solid, and I’ve never seen such smart aggressive base running in a long time. Those skills are key to winning in New York City softball.

Robots Off

The Robots didn’t play this weekend because the league took the day off.

Ball Busters Rained Out

The Ball Busters didn’t play on Sunday either. April showers washed out my two softball games this Sunday

Softball Week 1: Bats Fell Asleep

Sleeping Umpire at Great Lawn 001

Softball season got off to a bad start. The Robots and the Ball Busters each played two games, and we each lost both games. Colloquially put, our bats fell asleep, like the umpire from the earlier game at Central Park’s Great Lawn ball fields.

Robots vs. Soft Spot and Robots vs. Balls Deep

My defending champion Robots lost a heartbreaker against a rejuvenated Soft Spot team on Saturday in McCarren Park. We dropped the first game 8-7 in eleven innings. We then lost the second game to Balls Deep by a much more embarrassing score. I pitched both games and by the middle of the second game, I must have ran out of gas because I just couldn’t get my pitches to not find the middle of the plate. We also couldn’t score.

Ball Busters vs. Jackals

On Sunday in Central Park, the Balls Busters, who finished in first place last season (but lost in the first round of the playoffs), lost the first game, 1-0, to the Jackals. We regrouped and put some runs on the scoreboard, but still fell short, 5-4, in the second game. I pitched both these games too, and I thought my arm was going to fall off, but it turns out all that cycling I did in the last few months have given me a lot more flexibility than I usually have in April. I wasn’t as sore as I would have thought. Thanks unseasonably warm April!

Three one-run losses in two days suck, but I suspect that both teams were very rusty.

Thinking about Softball

Earlier today, one of my teammates from the Ball Busters sent me a video of me getting a base hit through the right side (the 3.5 hole, no less). It’s not that the hit was unusual—I regularly hit the ball that way—but in late January, softball seems so foreign. It was nice to remember seeing a sunny day in New York, my wearing shorts, and of course, playing softball in Central Park.

Thankfully, softball is only about 10 weeks away.

Robots Have Our Cake and Eat it, Too!

IMG_9782

After rescheduling it a few times since the end of the softball season, the Robots finally celebrated winning our first McCarren Park Softball championship with a party at our favorite bar, the Gibson. The party was pretty subdued, mostly because we had an impromptu happy hour reunion the night before. But unlike the night before, there were gifts, and there was cake.

IMG_9787

Shortz bought us a cake that had a first birthday candle on it, presumably to note that this was our first league championship. One of the nicer gifts was that Jen bought Shortz, Petemo, and I a set of robot ice cube trays. The Chillbots are awesome because they consist of a robot ice cube and a windup key for the back. The packaging exclaims, “It’s time to unwind.” What a delicious pun!

The team management has assured us that this party was but a prelude to a holiday celebration, and there will be capes at this affair. Oh my….

Robots Win the McCarren Cup

IMG_1042

The Gibson Robots won the McCarren Cup, the trophy for the Saturday softball league I’ve been playing on since 2005. We beat the defending champion Papacito’s All Stars in the best-of-three series, winning both games. We won the first game, 12-10, and the second game, which was suspended in the fifth inning due to rain and darkness, 11-8.

This was a total team win. I have never seen a team so focused on one goal, and everyone on the team had subscribed to team-first philosophy. There were no egos and heroes, and that is why we worked well together to bring home the cup.

IMG_6982

The Patrick Henry McCarren Cup, named for the state senator for whom the park is named, is residing at the Gibson in Williamsburg, at 108 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, where we celebrated for many hours.

Game 8: Another Washout

As it wasn’t bad enough that eight inches of rain washed out the playoffs for the Ball Busters yesterday, none of the ball fields in Central Park will open today so we’re not playing that game tonight.

So instead of playing seven to eight games in as few as four days, I ended playing four games in one, two, three days. That wasn’t too grueling now that I think about it. I did get a pretty bad rug turf burn at the end of the first game on Friday. I aggravated the scrape on Saturday when I slid into first base (don’t ask) and my sliding pad came off. Now it wasn’t just a scrape but a full-fledged cut with dirt from McCarren Park. Ugh!

Now I get three more days without softball. I next play on Thursday, a double-header for the Librarians as we take on Professor Thom’s, a very tough team. Maybe there will be new shirts at the game.

Games 5-6-7: Washed Out

The grand weekend of softball hit a pretty serious obstacle today. Rain. Lots of it. Nonstop since late last night.

Obviously the rain cancelled all of our games today so the Ball Busters have to wait yet again to start our playoff run. To some degree, it worked out for the best because we were missing a few players and some were flying in from Chicago to make the game in time.

The rain has been so bad, I wouldn’t be surprised if it washed out tomorrow’s Wilson Softball game. When it rains in Central Park, they usually don’t open the fields for several hours after the rain has stopped so it’s a pretty safe bet to anticipate no game tomorrow.