More Friendship Softball

The rain was unable to damper a set round robin like tournament with a couple of local teams from Saikai city. We brought our team and the team from the USS Guardian to play the Saikai City Western Yokose team and the Saikai City Eastern Yokose teams. The day day started with a homerun derby. Their field so their rules, in which we had to use rubber balls which were harder to hit, and crazier to field. It didn't really effect our power hitters as our 5 hitters ousted theirs 7-0. And thats about how the rest of the day went. Most of their players are pretty old and I'm sure they do well in their leagues, but when they play us it just seems like kids and adults. We beat the Nishi (East team) 21-5 in 6 innings. The Guardian beat the Higashi (West team) by almost the same score. After the first two games was lunch. All the food was home grown and was cooked on about 10 grills at the park. They were all very generous with the food as you couldn't walk by one of the grills with out the chefs putting more grilled meat on your plate. Finally I just left the area so that they couldn't put any more on my plate. After the BBQ, we had to play another game. We just switched teams and once again the results were the same. The Guardian beat the Nishi 8-5, while we kept up the heavy hitting and beat the Higashi 25-3. All in all we had a great time in the community relations event, one I'm glad that I was able to take part in. The pictures below are from the day, just click on them and a bigger version will appear. The first is one of my at bats, as you can see I still have that tongue-sticking-out habit I got from daddy. The next is all the players who played in the event, look close my head is partially hidden in the back row by the guy with the red hat, the right part of my sunglasses is showing. The third is a view from a local observation deck that overlooks the area. Finally one of the Nishi players doubled as a cook for our BBQ.