Playoffs...Mannheim

Enter the playoffs and finally some real competition. The Mannheim Tornado's were the third place team in the south however the south is considered the much stronger division in Germany. And I can see why! Mannheim finished quite a few games back from the first place team but they are still a very, very good team.

To start they threw a lefty...nothing over powering, but very good at hitting his spot. Then they brought in a righty power pitcher who I actually didn't think was all to impressive. The lefty went three innings giving up two runs (both scored by Cy) then the righty came in and we scored two more off of him (once by Cy).

As far as pitching goes, every talked about how good their pitching is and how we are finally going to face some real pitching! However I was not one to jump on that bandwagon. I did not hit very well at all, but there is another reason for that. I think the catcher did a very good job at calling pitches. Example...against the lefty, I faced him twice and saw just one curve ball, and surprisingly a couple of change ups. I never see change ups from lefties. However against the righty....I saw just a couple of fastballs and almost all curves. oddly enough, I never saw a change up! I normally don't swing at curve balls until I get to two strike which made it difficult for me because then I would be hitting in the hole almost every at bat. And example of one of my at bats went like this....curve ball for a strike, curve ball for strike two, fast ball up and away for a ball, then another curve ball for a strike which i would then have to swing at. All in all, I put together some very good at bats in both games. I had a couple at bats where I made the pitcher throw around 11 pitches however I never saw a fast ball. I was almost amazed at the other team for not giving in to throwing me fastballs and throwing nothing but curveballs with very, very good control.

We ended up winning the first game 4-3 and Cy had an awesome game. He was 3-4 with three runs scored. he single handedly beat the other team. I on the other hand was 0-4 with a sac bunt and a lot of foul balls.

The second game we just kind of lost the intensity. We lost 10-5 however it was very close until about the 6th inning. I was actually 1-0 until the 6th. Once again we had good at bats however late in the game we had a couple crucial errors defensively then they just ran with the momentum. I don't think we can say much about this game except that we just ran out of steam.

We will meet up with them again next saturday in this best of 5 series. We now have homefield advantage which I normally don't believe in, but they play in such an odd shaped field that I can now say that we have homefield advantage.