I stand next to third base while the sun was beaming down on myself almost giving me a sunburn. The sand was whipping in the wind like a tornado as the birds were singing their little hearts out. Todays was a beautiful late spring early summer day in which there was not a cloud in the sky. My baseball team the Tampa Bay Rays was in the world series of the CLL a.k.a. the Cromwell Little League. Myself nor any of my teammates and coaches would have even imagined that we would have gotten this far in the playoffs partly because of our below 500% season. That mean we had more losses than wins. We are lucky that all teams in our league make the playoffs because that is when we went from “the sucky team” to the talk of the town. Now our once called “sucky” team was in the 3 game world series against the great Seattle Mariners.
The time has came and my team and myself have game 1 on our platter of the world series. The predictions were a blowout by the Mariners, but us rays were not going to let this happen.
Play ball! I hear. We would jump off to a 10-0 lead within the first few innings out of 6. My team was confident that we could pull the game with a W from there, but then things began to downfall within the next few innings. In literally a blink of an eye its a tie score of 14-14. It is the bottom of the last inning and the all star caliber player Joey walks up to the plate. Just as expected by him, he hits a walk off grand slam giving the Mariners a 18-14 win over us Rays.
I was not worried about this loss because now I know that now we can now beat anybody. We will come back in 2 days and show the Mariners who the real champions are. I'm beginning to feel confident about coming home with a big championship trophy.
The 2 day wait has finally arrived. The game began and we get another hot start with a 4-0 lead in the 3rd inning. Once again this lead does not last forever. There is a tie game heading into the 5th inning, 4-4. All I am thinking to myself is that we can’t lose now, we have come this far to lose a 0-2 series to the Mariners in the world series. Now the bottom of the 6th inning the Mariners are winning 6-5. Myself as well as my team all of the sudden lost hope as we all “knew” we could not win. We ended up losing the 3 game world series against the Mariners 0-2 in only 2 games.
To tell you the truth, I have no anger or any type of regret in my gut. We came from being the worst team in the league to the second best, now that is saying something. From the first practice that us rays had this season, nobody would have thought about us getting this far, but we never stopped giving up. If you ever feel like something or yourself in life has no purpose, talent, and etc., never stop trying and advancing forward to succeed because you never know where you may end up.
After my team had time to think about our experience… holy crap! We basically went from nothing to the 2nd best team in the league. That is true dedication and heart for the game and winning because of all of my teams’ hard work put into coming out with a 2nd place standing out of 6 teams in the whole league.
Sadly this was my last year playing baseball for CLL, but I left the team with a successful note in my book due to the fact of how far my team made it in the playoffs. Although a win would have been better, we still made it this far in which nobody would have ever thought that would happen, but it did happen. This experience has taught me that whenever I feel like something or someone is not good enough, think again because you never know how things can turn out.