June 24

As I've mentioned previously, Brady's juniors little league team sailed through the regular season undefeated. Then they won the first two games of their Districts experience, which earned them a berth in the championship game. Said-game happened tonight. And it was little short of an unmitigated disaster.

Brady was the starting pitcher and threw plenty of strikes, but the other team hit well. (Where these players were during the regular season, I don't know.) And the defense behind him wasn't as sharp as they've typically been. And he had to throw to a back-up catcher, because just a few pitches into the game, the catcher who started called time and reported that something was wrong with his thumb and exited. The back-up catcher isn't really a catcher at all, so although he did a good job as a fill-in, he wasn't able to handle Brady's off-speed pitches, which created issues.

On top of that, his team didn't hit particularly well, either. And the icing on the crap cake? A ball took a bad hop on the infield grass and smacked our shortstop in the eye. He fell to the ground in obvious pain, and had to be replaced by the kid with the injured thumb (even though, as he told Brady --who was playing third base at the time-- he couldn't squeeze his glove at all, and hoped that nothing would come his way).

So yeah, they lost. By a lot. The coach was unhappy. Brady was bummed that the defense wasn't better. (And I'm not even going to bring up the umpire because that would be so cliche, but I'll say there were several very questionable calls made that adversely affected our team.) And it turns out that the injured thumb is actually a fractured thumb.

But although it was truly a terrible game for them, it was literally their first bad game of the spring. And although the timing of loss number one wasn't awesome, it's not over yet because the double elimination format means they will play again tomorrow. I have no idea who will catch or if the shortstop will be able to open his eye and I don't know how they'll react to being on the brink of elimination, but I trust that what should happen will happen. And I'm grateful that they'll have a chance to demonstrate resilience tomorrow, because it's a blessing to be able to bounce back from disappointment.