Baseball stuff

    Downtown U. (a.k.a. the University of South Carolina) has a very, very good baseball team. They won consecutive national championships a few years ago and then played in the championship game the year after that. This year I don't think anyone was exactly expecting that kind of performance, but they have surprised us pleasantly, hanging around the top 20 all year and more recently clocking in at either #1 or 2.
    Friday was an inclement weather day in town. The baseball game against the University of Tennessee started late and was dogged by rain all evening. Tennessee led all game but the Gamecocks (Downtown U.) caught up by the ninth. The teams played three scoreless innings until the rain picked up. Officials started a rain delay at midnight, which struck me as crazy. Not surprisingly, the game was eventually postponed until Saturday.
    Saturday, the game resumed. There was another scoreless inning and then the Gamecocks won it in the bottom of the 14th on a home run.
    The regular Saturday game started an hour later. Our coach made a very unorthodox move by having the regular Saturday starter pitch the completion of the Friday game and then start the Saturday game, too. This didn't look too brilliant when Tennessee went ahead 6-0. But in the end, it worked out. By the 9th inning, SC had scraped back to 6-3. Max Schrock hit a two-run homer to pull within one. Then with two outs in the bottom of the ninth (as we used to say), Grayson Greiner hit a grand slam to win it 9-6.
    Now anyone curious about South Carolina's baseball fortunes can look up the scores on the Internet. I'm not actually writing all this to publicize the team, but for back story. (Hey, at least I skipped the batters between the home runs, right?) I had two points.
    First, I ran an errand during the late innings of the official Saturday game. The Gamecocks were trailing, but they're the much better team, they've already shown a capacity for late-inning heroics, and they're playing at home. Nevertheless, I passed near the stadium four times and all four times I was stopped by police to let fans in garnet and black (our colors) leaving the stadium cross the road.
    Not that they were leaving in vast numbers, mind you, but the stadium only holds 8 or 9,000. And neither am I criticizing them for leaving early. No, my point is that NONE of these people are ever going to admit that they weren't there for the game-ending grand slam! Instead I imagine that some multiple of those 9,000 will claim that they were there.
    The second point is that the Gamecocks won two games without ever having the lead until the very last at-bat. Today, though, Tennessee has us right where they want us. We've been leading all the way. They've finally figured it out!