Rats Take on Manila Once Again
The travelling River Rats softball team descended upon one of our favourite cites, Manila, from March 4-8 for the Annual Pangaea International Softball tournament. This year’s team had the usual cast of characters from our Singapore Team including some of our Taiwan and Manila brothers such as Ozzie"Rat Tail" Burns, Dan" I Will Pitch till I'm 70" Grindell, Vic "I Can Still Catch" Caluag, Butch "Bloop Single" Madrigal and Chris "I'll Wake up Kevin" Calvert. And not to be undone the long distance award goes to Stacy Fender all the way from Portland! This year's team also sported some Rat Traveling Rookies, Travis Washko, Len Kricek and Traymer Ray! Thanks for carrying the equipment all weekend! The tourney started with The Rats playing 3 games on Friday with a resounding 19-5 win over the Tokyo Team. However, we came back down to earth after a 14-5 drubbing by The Fattboyz/Guzzler Team. At least we beat the spread by losing by less than 10 runs! The third game of the day was the highlight as The Rats were down 14-11 going to the bottom of the 7th inning against Meralco and their super high ball pitcher. We still believe the score was 13-11 at the time but that's another story! It didn't take long for the controversy to begin with Willy "TROT" Wahba up at the plate. How befitting Trot would be at the center of a HR controversy once again. If you recall last year Trot hit what looked to be a HR had he ran the bases only to fall short and land on 3rd. This year Trot hit a laser down the right field line which bounced off the Right Fielder and rolled to the fence. By the time the RF got the ball Trot was rounding 3rd and heading on home with a dinger to take the score to 14-12. But wait!! The umpire who was close to 200 feet away claimed the ball went past the fence line and ruled it a ground rule double. Well after numerous arguments and various rules interpretations The Rats were not going to win this argument against the home town favourites! So Trot had to go back to 2nd base and once again be denied a HR. Though, officially in our scorebook it was a HR. Unfortunately, even with another two hits and the tying run on base neither Phun Phil nor Capt Ron could get the big hit to win the game!
Saturday started off well with a resounding 1win against The Allcare Insurance team to be followed by another match up with our fierce rivals and good friends The Gashouse Gang from HK! The game was close with the Rats down 7-6 going into the 4th inning but then GasHouse scored a whole bunch of runs and The Rats could not fight their way back. This actually put The Rats in 3rd place in our bracket by way of run differential and had to proceed to the semi-finals game in the A Division on Sunday morning at 8am against our good buddies Famous Larry’s from Taiwan. In order to prepare for this Sports Playa decided the best way to spur on the team was to relieve a certain DOG of the hair on his back! So somewhere in the wee hrs of the morning in the Rats Den our fearless DOG had his back shaved. While this was inspirational it did not do much for the game the next morning. The Rats started out well scoring a few runs in the top of the first but thanks to 8 hits/errors in a row Famous Larry’s opened up a big lead. The Rats tried to fight back but could never recover. No thanks to Kevin for a no show!!
There were some hitting stars but not too many:
Way to go boys:
Phun Phil – 10/23 = .434
No Show Kevin – 8/18 = .444
Travis Washko & Chris Calvert – 9/19 = .474
Trot – 8/19 = .421
Stacy Fender – 5/6 = .833
Butch Madrigal – 4/6 = .666
Vic Caluag - 4/8 = .500
