Fear the Crab

My fourth year of participation in the AUW charity softball tournament saw better success than last year, as the UH System Darksiders won its third championship in four years. If I had to peg one reason for the turnaround, it was the effort of our outfielders taking away the opposing teams’ big hitters.

Practices prior to the tournament were as in the past; focused solely on hitting. Personally I tried to work on hits to the opposite field, and thanks to some timing I felt I got comfortable enough with pitches to do that come game time. Unfortunately when the tournament started, we used a different pitcher. This meant I had to re-adjust during play, and unfortunately our pitcher wasn’t as consistent. Since we only had three pitches to get a hit, this meant our offensive production was limited.

However, on defense the team really showed up. We fielded 4 players deep and one playing “short center,” with the philosophy of ensuring that all hits would be in front of us. Most teams would try for the long ball, particularly since there’s a lot of field in Les Murakami Stadium; anything getting past a fielder is practically a home run. Since the team did not have pre-assigned positions, I volunteered for left, and was certainly glad that experienced players completed the outfield. Also glad that we were a “younger” outfield compared to the older folk manning the bases.

With our positioning we were able to easily run down and snag the big hits. We allowed the small dink shots or grounders through the infield, as it was much easier to limit the runners to one base by getting the ball in quickly and stop them from “running the bases.” This way we forced the teams to earn their runs, forced them to go through several batters just to bring home one.

Not to say that everything was easy. A few times in left field I was forced to sprint back and make the catch, one of which I almost expected to be over-the-shoulder. That 12-inch ball easily carries and its trajectory is deceptive, so it was important that my first step was backward. Each outfielder has several catches and limited the damage to only a few runs.

And we needed that defense. Our team captain’s philosophy of this tournament being a “home run game” is valid, but that strategy is only as effective as the competency of our bats compared to the incompetence of the defense. As demonstrated, a good outfield can take away the long ball. Meanwhile, at-bat we had a hard time adjusting to the new pitcher and had to earn our runs off singles. We were helped by a few errors and put runners in scoring position, and managed enough to keep squeaking by.

Our first game was against UH West Oahu, which we won after the 20-minute timeout by being ahead a couple of runs. The next opponent was last year’s champion, UH Mānoa, a really young team with a lot of experience and power. This team put our defensive strategy to the test, but we managed to limit them to 2 runs and won with 3 of our own.

We were supposed to play the AUW team next, but they decided to forfeit their remaining games with the reason that they “wanted the night to be between the UH campuses.” I suppose that’s admirable, and it did mean a shortened evening, but personally I really would have wanted to test ourselves against them. The AUW team seemed strong this year, a far cry from their previous incarnations. The end result, though, was that our win by forfeiture meant we were suddenly in the championship game and faced the winner of the loser’s bracket, UH Mānoa.

As the championship game had no time limit, we needed to have 3 solid innings of softball to put Mānoa away. Winning the coin flip our captain decided to put us on the field first, and immediately we could see the result of our defensive strategy. Mānoa’s normal power style suddenly changed to a softer attempt at dropping hits into the gaps, but this resulted more often in easy grounders for our infielders.

First inning was a 0-0 stalemate. We allowed one run in the second, but scored twice to put ourselves ahead. Top of the third, we shut down the Mānoa bats and brought the trophy back to the Systems office.