During the weekend of the tenth and eleventh of March, Cal Poly hosted a softball tournament. I’d never watched college softball in person before, only on television. This was also the first time I’d kept score of softball for fun; when my sister and cousin played Little League I would keep score for their teams a lot.

On the Friday, my partner Elizabeth and I went to Cal Poly’s first game against Marist College. She played softball since she was young until she graduated high school, so she likes watching it. We got there a bit late because we left after Elizabeth got off work, and even though we only missed the first inning, we missed all the offense. Marist scored one and Cal Poly scored two, and there were no runs after that. After we got there Elizabeth was picked to win tickets for two to tour Hearst Castle, which is near Cal Poly, if the team hit a home run in the bottom of the fourth. She lost. It was a good pitching game, and they only play seven innings, so it flew by.

Saturday morning was the first full game I watched. It was against Marist again. Somebody won the Hearst Castle passes when Shelby Jeffries homered in the fourth. One day too late, I guess. Lindsey Chalmers threw the whole game for the Mustangs and won. She throws hard. The best name on the team was definitely Crimson Kaiser; could be the name of a Bond film or a Golden Age comic book villain. However, my favorite player was Noellah Ramos, because I saw her juggling before the game. This is an interesting scorecard, as it was my first attempt at doing a softball game in this book. I treated reentry as a regular substitution, designated by the circled letters. There was also an instance where a runner was called out for leaving the base before the ball left the pitcher’s hand, which I scored as a pickoff and noted that the runner left early. If anyone has any insights into the proper way to do this, let me know.

Cal Poly was supposed to play North Dakota that night, but it was moved to Sunday because of rain. This game wasn’t as good as the last one. There were eight errors and it was just overall kind of a sluggish and sloppy game on both sides. Cal Poly won on a walk-off hit, so that was pretty cool. Lindsey Chalmers won her second game in as many days, this time in relief. In other news, I was in the Hearst Castle contest this game and did not win. Elizabeth was in a different one where if they struck someone out in the top of the third you’d win free food, and we got a bag of Reese’s Pieces for free. Definitely the highlight of the weekend.

It was a pretty good weekend of softball and it was good to use my Bob Carpenter scorebook again. It was also kind of fun to see some of the different rules in softball. The next post will return to baseball. Thanks for reading.