DON'T BOTHER ME; I'M WATCHING THE LIVESTREAM OF TAP ROOM AND THE COLLAR

The Pen & Pencil softball team got back on the sunny side of the street Tuesday night at Edgeley 8 with a 14-3 win over Green Tambourine, which did, in fact, bring a green tambourine to the game. The win brings us back to level after six games and we can peek above .500 next week with a win over the Zoo on Monday night. That would be nice.

It’s kind of a strange season in the old CCSL. We’re playing an unbalanced schedule for the sake of better competition for all and liberty for some, and that means the standings aren’t necessarily reflective of very

much. The good news is that every team makes the playoffs and everybody gets a sno-cone. So, we find out what’s what then (when everyone is on vacation).

Anyway, it was a well-played game against the jangly musical instruments, at least from our point of view. We had 22 hits to power the 14 runs, and, in keeping with the wood bat thing, all but five of them were singles. The Red Inks strung them together, though, scoring three runs in the top of the first, adding single runs in the second and fourth, then bunching eight runs in the final three innings to open some breathing room.

The Tambourines, who broke out either a CD boombox or an 8-track player for their walkup musical

accompaniment – a nice touch – were silent at the plate for the first five innings before scratching out a single run in the sixth and then adding another pair of runs in the seventh. P&P was nearly P&perfect in the field, holding the Tambos to just 11 hits, all singles.

It was a friendly game, which the GT’s needed, coming off a somewhat contentious 10-inning loss to the Art Museum the night before, a game in which the Impressionists invoked the six-ball-walk-rule (several times) to break a tie in the top of the 10^th, despite having gotten to the 10^th inning against a team that is now 5-20 in the last two seasons and was playing that particular game with nine players in the field, including women at both corner outfield positions. Oh, and it was top of the order for Art in the 10^th. Well, all you can figure is it must have been a very important game.

Anyway, we proved that it’s easy to be great sportsmen when you have an eight-run lead, which might not be news. We didn’t even get pissed when Dusty pulled the delayed-tag-up score from third to end the shutout bid in the sixth. Maybe a little, but you can’t blame a guy for trying.

In the scorebook, the Writing Instruments got 4-for-4 nights from Brian Donlen and Steve Lynch. Donlen’s bases-loaded double in the fifth was the big hit of the night to open up the scoring. Three hits each for George Miller and Jon Snyder, two each for Russ Krause, Chris Yasiejko and Chris Brennan, who had a pair of RBI hits, including a sixth-inning double. Management got the win on the flat place and didn’t walk anyone. We’ll leave it at that for now.

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            Forgot one thing. Fleisher Art Memorial is now the South Philly Nomads, in deference to their new sponsor, the fabulous Nomad Pizza. Will try to change all references to reflect this, but if you look at the standings and say, “Who the fuck are the Nomads?” now you will know. They haven’t lost a game yet – we damn sure know they didn’t lose to us – and so they get to be called whatever they want for a while.