Barbee's World: Looking back at the NWAC Softball Championships
Great Expectations – Inflatable bananas, temporary fences & LCC's attempt to repeat falls apart on the season's final day
Sam Barbee special to Blast Zone Media / blastzonenews@gmail.com
NWAC Softball / Commentary
PORTLAND — It seems like every year I’m tempted to write about the nature of failure, what constitutes it, how success and failure are often connected and related and not so different from each other.
But I don’t want to do that here. I don’t want to retread old ground.
Instead, with the NWAC Baseball Championship in full swing at Story Field in Longview, let’s talk about vibes. Vibes are everything. Vibes are like 70 percent of the operation. Bad vibes are a momentum killer. Good vibes are a tail wind.
Mt. Hood hit five homers in its 11-3 win over LCC in the championship opener to force an if needed game. And the vibes are bad in LCC’s dugout. Lots of emotion. I can probably approximate some of them for you; Letting people down, feeling it slip away, more than a little frustration.
We’ve all been there.
And I was curious going for a walk between games how LCC would respond. You don’t win as frequently as the Red Devils without behind able to bounce back. Earlier this year, after it’s year-long winning streak ended, the Red Devils won the next game and talked about how, actually, it was nice to not have to worry about it anymore.
But Sunday felt a little different.
We’ll talk about the stakes in a bit, but it felt like they became suddenly burdensome. Heavy. You got the feeling that one team was running out of gas, and the other was just getting started.
It was unusual because LCC is generally the team that is champing at the bit, that is, as the former New York Giant Lawrence Taylor once said, like “a pack of wild dogs.”
That’s right, the Saints from Mt. Hood had the vibes on championship Sunday. All LCC could do was desperately trying to summon them, but instead it may have been the specter of failure and unmet expectations that made an appearance. Hard to say. I wasn’t in the dugout.
But the vibes mattered, even if you don’t believe in ghosts.
Things I Liked
Sadie Guyette!
Not long for this league is she. Nobody to ever play college softball has had more RBIs in a season that Guyette.
Guyette knocked in 136 runs this season in 55 games. She hit.584 (104-for-178) with 26 doubles and 27 homers. She had two nine RBI games. She went hitless just three times, but with some 0-for-0s because nobody wanted to pitch to her.
And for good reason. When she gets what she’s looking for, she doesn’t miss. The ball comes off the bat crazy.
And like, I totally get not wanting any part of that. But even when teams try to avoid Guyette — she finds a way to make them pay.
In Sunday’s championship doubleheader, Guyette wen 3-for-4 across the two games with five runs, a double, a homer, an RBI and four walks.
In fact, LCC was so interested in avoiding her they intentionally walked her in the first inning of Sunday’s opener, and, because it’s really hard to intentionally throw a ball in the other batter’s box, it resulted in two wild pitches, the second of which let in a run.
Greg Maddux once said of Barry Bonds that he was the easiest guy to pitch to because if it mattered at all you just walked him. And Guyette is certainly on that level in the NWAC.
If Games!
If games are what doubleheaders aspire to be.
When doubleheaders are wee lads running around the backyard, they want to be If Games when they grow up. They have a poster of If Game on their bedroom wall and fall asleep looking at it.
You can’t do better than an if game.
I mean, if you’re the team that lost to force it you might feel differently. But as a third party?
Oh. Oh. There’s just something about the stakes. There is no more next game, no next day. The mantra that powers these people of the diamond is gone. You have to do it now. No more safety net. No more time to think. The end of the line.
You can feel the emotion. You can feel the “Oh my, we’re about to do this.” And you can feel the “It’s getting away from us.” It’s all so clear, so tangible. You can tell who’s been playing with that kind of urgency all season, versus who is trying to turn it on at the end.
The teams that win are the teams that play every game with these stakes set and understood internally. Every pitch matters that way. Every game matters that way. Every rep at every practice matters that way. And it’s borne out in the results.
That isn’t to say that because Mt. Hood won on Sunday that LCC didn’t have the required urgency. I don’t believe that. You don’t go 47-6 or whatever and play for a consecutive NWAC titles without it.
But as Mt. Hood kept firing off homers in Game 1, and after the Saints rallied to flip the game in Game 2, you could feel an unfamiliar sentiment creeping in the Red Devils dugout.
“Oh no, there it goes…”
It’s a human thing.
Having Fun!
Mt. Hood had an absolute blast playing these games. I imagine they have that much fun all the time.
After every out, each player had a unique way to signaling to each other whether there were none, one or two outs. A couple times the second baseman had to go really fast to make sure she got all of them in before the next pitch. The right fielder had the same problem. It looked fun.
The Saints also had a giant banana they would hold during defensive innings. And a player wore a fun hat while warming up the left fielder from the third base dugout.
The reminder that this is just a game was pretty cool, especially considering the stakes we talked about.
Bunts!
The game is more fun when runs don’t come easily.
I’m on the record saying this. I’m not anti-homer. But I think they’re kinda boring. Maybe I feel this way because I couldn’t (still can’t) hit them and so I’m biased.
Ça va. So it goes.
But LCC and Mt. Hood both clearly felt like runs would be at a premium. The Red Devils tried a first-and-third steal play in Game 1. It didn’t work, but set the tone for the rest of the day — small ball was in the park.
There were lots of great bunts in Game 2, especially in the second half of the contest where things really tightened up.
I’m a big fan of making the other team play defense, even as I understand the logic of homers. I get that they can’t catch it if you hit it over the fence. It makes sense. I get the emotion, I get how hard it is, all that.
But I want to make the other team use their gloves. I want them to catch the ball, throw the ball, catch the ball. The law of averages dictates that eventually they’ll screw it up. And when they do — that’s when you pounce. LCC did that, but they couldn’t quite pounce hard enough and came up just short in the end.
Ah, well, nevertheless.
Things I didn’t like
Having fun?
There exists a line in having fun. We used to call in sportsmanship, but that ship seems to have sailed.
Maybe it’s just pushed off from the dock and it seems like we can run back on, but the boat is bigger than you think, making the distances greater than they appear, making the speed more impactful and it’s momentum effectively unstoppable — and so, there’s nothing we can do.
There comes a time where we have to wonder if it’s gotten a bit, how do you say, too much?
Mt. Hood got a strikeout to end an inning. Okay cool. Dugout empties to greet the team as they come off the field. Fair play.
But they also have a celebratory chair and the Saint slam it down in (or at least close to) fair territory and the pitcher takes a seat until action is set to resume. This is where they’e lost me and the proverbial shark seems to have been jumped.
Sure, we say “Throw them a chair!”, right? Meaning: Sit ‘em down. Send ‘em back in. Punch them out, etc…
But the physical manifestation of a chair on the field is, in my left-handed opinion, bad form.
So we’re having fun. Cool. Having fun isn’t justification in and of itself. Things have constraints. They have to. That’s what rules, written and unwritten, exist to do. They have to keep things within an acceptable bounds.
If you run out of the baseline, you’re out. If you get in the way of somebody, they get an extra base. These rules keep people from making a mockery of the operation.
We have to get back to some kind of behavioral middle ground. It’s perfectly cool to celebrate a good thing. But there has to be a limit. There has to be a constraint.
And it’s on the adults. Which isn’t fun, but it’s the right thing do.
Temporary Fences?
Delta Park does a really good job of putting on this tournament. This is not meant to be a criticism of the park or the City of Portland.
But temporary fences stink. I wish I could use a stronger word, but we have constraints (see how that works?) to keep things in acceptable bounds around here.
First of all, they seemed pretty short. Line drives in the gap turned into homers. A homer should be a nuke, a shot, a bomb, that goes very far. Off the bat you think “no chance they catch that one!” It’s loud. It sounds different. It pulls you from your brief distraction or day dream by the sound and the sudden gasp of the crowd tells you all you need to know.
The baseball tournament has this thanks to the big yard at David Story Field with the (mostly) real wood bats. But there were some balls that didn’t feel like homers off the bat that left the yard at Delta Park, and several times the temp fences did something weird — which is a part of its very nature.
At one point Lower Columbia dropped a homer over the fence on a ball that felt like a routine fly out. Maybe it should’ve been, but it shouldn’t have been a homer. Later, both an LCC and a Mt. Hood outfielder tripped over the temporary fence and fell down while tracking batted balls.
Maybe we should communicate more in the outfield. But maybe we have something better, or maybe we move the walls away from home plate some. These are developed athletes, capable of hitting the ball relatively far. I mean, Mt. Hood’s slap hitter hit a backside homer! That’s weird!
At least the porta-potties were emptied.
About The Author: Sam Barbee is a freelance sports reporter and a former member of The Daily News sports desk. Barbee, was once a southpaw pitcher for the R.A. Long Lumberjacks, is now an assistant baseball coach with Heritage High School in the spring and JBD Athletics in the summer.
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