Softball Starts with Lone Rock Tournament

The basketball talk is officially over now as the first softball tournament of the year has started. My blog gets some what weak over the summer months as I play a lot of slow pitch softball and don't have a lot of free time to be on here typing. When I talk slow pitch softball I'm talking unlimited arc softball where your seeing 30 foot pitches not the 6-12 arc that a lot of people are playing around the state of Wisconsin. I will try to be on here as much as I can and will be talking about how the season is going each of my teams records and ranking the teams that I have seen play.

I currently play for Swagger Inn for tournaments on the weekend, Mt. Olympus in the Wisconsin Dells league, Anjeros in Mauston league, and seems that I will be playing in Portage league as well, as long as our sponsorship goes through. Swagger Inn was formally known as Harmony but, with Harmony burning down sponsorship has switched. We typically take somewhere from third to sixth place in most tournaments with a few exceptions of top finish or a two and out finishes. Mt. Olympus is a very young team which we played our first season last year and had great success finish second in the league before bowing out in the tournament semi final. Anjeros is a team that were co-champs in the Mauston league during regular season and then were able to take down Harmony in the championship game with only eight players.

The tournament year started off so so with Swagger Inn going 2-1 before the tournament was finally rained out. Friday night we arrived early to see Royal Bank, a team that I have some buddies play on, 10 run rule a team that I didn't catch the name of, they had some guys with Best Buds shirts on but, don't believe they were playing under this name. In our first game of the tournament we took on O'Finle from the Cazanovia, Richland Center area. Team we probably should of run rules we ended up beating 17-6 after giving up a couple runs in the bottom of the sixth inning. In the final game of the night Tri State was taking on tournament host Burnstads Miller. Try State jumped out to an early 18-5 lead after two innings and we figured the game was over so we headed out. Apparantly we left to early as Burnstads was able to come back and win 19-18.

Saturday I had to work so I missed our first game of the day. We ended up beating a pretty good Carpet Plus team 25-8. When I arrived Royal Bank was once again playing,this time getting beat by a run rule or close to it to Burnstads Miller. Our next game proved to be the toughest of the tournament against Sprint Print who dominated us in a 20-8 win or something close to that. We were then suppose to take on O'Finley's again but, tournament was rained out by this time. I did get a chance to watch parts of three games during this time. O'Finleys took on Tri State. I went to the car half way through this game and somehow O'Finleys was able to hang on for a close fought win. We left and went to eat and when we came back O'Finleys was playing again in one of the longest games ever seen. They were playing a team called Those Guys and neither team was to great in this one as the final score was O'Finleys winning 33-23 in a game where I don't believe there was an earned run as there was error after error in the game. The finally game of the night ended short as Carpet Plus was up 8 to 4 over a team that I didn't catch their name,and the other team forfeited because the rain was coming down so hard.

Rankings- In the rankings I will include where the team is from, if I know, where we saw them, and their record in games I've seen them play.

1. Sprint Print (Fitchburg) Lone Rock, 2-0 Have very good pitcher and hit the ball really well.
2. Burnstads Miller (Plain/Richland Center) Lone Rock 2-0 Hit the long ball very very well. Defense seemed to be a question mark.
3. Swagger Inn (Lyndon State/Mauston) US 2-1 Very good overall team speed, with streaky hitting, and solid defense.
4. Carpet Plus (Madison) Lone Rock 1-1 Hit the ball very hard and play pretty solid defense
5. Royal Bank (Elroy/Kendall) Lone Rock 2-1 Streaky hitting team and play good defense.
6. O'Finley's (Richland Center/Cazanovia) Lone Rock 2-1 Good team speed but, struggle when they get down.
7. Tri State (Kendall/Elroy/Richland Center) Lone Rock 0-2 A lot better then what their record shows.
8. Those Guys (Lone Rock/Spring Green) Lone Rock 0-2 Only on here because there the only other team that I actually saw.

Swagger Inn 2-1

Well one tournament down and a lot more to go. Should be another great summer.