At Hartford Senators

Yesterday's game was played at the Hartford Senator's new field which is at the location where Hartford's last minor league team ( The Hartford Laurels) last played a game in 1952. Our game was to be the first base ball game at that location since 1952.

The field is just that - a field. No infield dirt, no mound, no backstop, not a true hop anywhere. This is really going to be old school base ball. The Friends of Vintage Base Ball are there helping to lay out the field for the game. They've set up a clothes line on stakes approximately where a backstop might be but when I asked about ground rules they say everything is in play. Cranks (fans) and players are sitting on the field side of the clothes line so I'm not sure what the point of it was.

The game started just like last week. Buck won the toss again (?!) and we took the field. The first striker (batter) hit a routine daisy cutter (ground ball) to short and the ball was muffed (misplayed) and the striker reached safely.

The temperature was in the 80's for the first time since last fall sometime and everyone is wilting a little in the heat but it is nice not to have to put a warm up jacket between innings. Hartford scored 3 in the top of the first but we came back with 2 in the bottom and then 3 more in the bottom of the second to take a 2 run lead but Hartford tallied 2 in the top of the 3rd and we were tied again. In the bottom of the 4th we scored 4 runs to take what seem to me like a comfortable lead but Hartford came charging back again in the top of the 5th with 4 runs of their own - 3 of them coming on a home run. We were tied again at 9.

After 5 innings I was done hurling and gave way to Bullet. Unfortunately the Senators weren't done hitting. They tallied 6 runs in the top of the 6th to take a commanding lead and never looked back scoring 4 more in the final 3 innings. We were able score a few more to make the final score a respectable 19-14.

In our defense, we were without 3 key players (Turk, Pops and Connie) and had only 9 players on a hot day. We've got another game against the Senators on May 24th. It should be a good one.