[Rich]

I finished my high school season yesterday. Worked the plate in a sectional game that really was 2 games in 1:

The line:

Visitors - 00000 - 0
Home - 000(11)x - 11

The game was scoreless through 3.5 innings and I had two seven-or-less pitch innings (someone told me later). We had 3.5 played in about 30 minutes.

Then the wheels fell off. I remember that the first 2 outs of the bottom of the fourth were force outs at the plate. This came after many, many runs were scored. The turning point was when the visiting pitcher hung a 1-2 curveball that the batter drilled to the fence. Before that, visiting F1 had great confidence in the pitch and even had some swinging strikeouts with pitches in the dirt. After that double, though, I don't remember one effective curveball until they finally removed him after 6-7 runs had scored.

I also took a decent velocity fastball (untouched) straight to the helmet somewhere in the middle of the inning. The ringing gave way to nothing, but I ended up with a pretty decent headache an hour or two later. I felt better later in the day. I'm pretty convinced I would've fared no better with a traditional mask on this shot as it hit right on the bars over my forehead.

Linescore for the bottom of the fourth? 11 runs, 5 hits, 6 errors, 2 LOB. And yes, we play with the 10-run-rule, even in the playoffs.

So it was a very strange 1:15 game. And now, it's only summer ball left.