Road Trip: The Mirage Represents Barnegat at Exit 44

The Mirage Bombers traveled down to exit 44 and completed the second of a home and home series with the Smithville Raiders.

Skip Vaccarello, Pat Pipi, Charlie Thomas, John Arena, Dominic Pugliese, Joe Germano, Marty Lisella, Robin Greenwald, Rich Zaccagana, Ben LoScalzo, Lou Traficante, Mike Pappas, Bill Farmer and Artie Posillipo.

We expected we would encounter a few surprises in today's game and we sure did.

We were playing on their turf, so the rules were theirs to make. In our last game on Brackman field, your heroes flexed their muscles with a combination of power and speed and routed Smithville 22-6.

The Raiders had one month to come up with a strategy to slow us down and it almost worked. In an effort to neutralize our power, their first move was to change their softballs from a 375 core to the limited flight 275 core.

In all my years on the planet I never played with – let me rephrase that, I never heard of – a 275 core softball. They must use them for girls softball.

Their second trick was to load the field with 12 men aside. Not sure I ever ran into that before either.The idea is similar to a basketball team using a slowdown approach while facing a superior opponent, or a football team using every second on the play clock before hiking the ball, thus keeping a high powered offense off the field as long as possible.

The hope was that the changes would get in our heads and throw us off our game. It did just that for an inning or so, but after seeing long fly balls just die in the outfield the Mirage switched their usual style of Bombs away to that of slap a single here and slap a single there.

A good team knows how to finish.

Things were looking great for your Boys as they built up a 10-0 lead after three innings. They had us just where they wanted us.

Even though baseball is played without a game clock, it cannot be played successfully without acknowledging and making use of the athletic clock that ticks inside our heads. Read that again!

Apparently with that 10-zip lead we thought the game was over. Our defense went from crisp and clean to sloppy and lackluster.

Starting pitcher Lou seemed pre-occupied by the pretty ladies in the stands and with a small brush-fire smoldering, Skip thought it was time for a change.

Artie was brought in with what we thought was an extinguisher, turns out Artie was dragging along his GAS can instead, things quickly started to unravel.

As our errors started to climb so did their score. By the fifth, our lead had shrunk to 10-7. It was physical and mental error on top of physical and mental error. Do not say to yourself, "Well it wasn't me." We win and lose as a team.

Skip, in a panic, started to look around, "Where is Lou?" Where else, Lou was again found sitting in the stands with the Groupies. "Traficante, get back in there and close this out!" 

Heading into the last inning the Bombers held a 13-9 lead, a two-out double by Domonic and a clutch single by Joe G plates run #14 as Smithville bats for the last time.

Two more errors and a bad call by the ump now has the score at 14-12 Mirage, with two outs and the bases loaded the stage was set for a long trip home. The pitch...a smash headed up the middle, a diving stab by Charlie and a step on the bag produces a hard fought 14-12 Mirage win. Whew!

Lou gets both the win and the save in this one.

Baseball is the only game where the defense controls the ball. No other sport can make that claim. I hope we learned that today.

In the Managers show, Skip was at a loss for words. "We had a big lead and we just let down our defensive guard, We were lucky to win this one,this will never happen to our club again."

Skip also hinted around that he may ban the Groupies on the days that Lou is scheduled to pitch.

BOMBER BITS:

The Bombers improved their season record to an astonishing 34-4,the best in our 13 year history.

This is the last season we will be called the Mirage Bombers, Yesterday Skip and Pat finalized an agreement with Jon Spiaggia. New uniforms have been ordered and beginning Sept. 5, we will be known as the Spiaggia's Bombers.

This will be a win-win for all concerned. Besides new uniforms, each member of the travel team will get a discount card to the restaurant and Jon will be the owner of the most successful senior softball program in the area.

No curfew tonight, boys.