MMSL 2008

No sense putting off the inevitable. The Thursday night downpour and subsequent damp, cloudy and cold weather have left our fields unplayable.

Early reports today paint a soggy picture: Mud and muck, standing water everywhere, even in the grass. With the rain breaking Friday morning there was an outside chance we might be able to whip some sites into shape. But more rain came through later in the morning and it’s stayed cold and damp since then. The county even canceled Friday night games at the pristine regional parks; if those fields can’t be made playable, neither can ours, most likely.

So, we’ll play this week’s matchups on Saturday May 17th. We’ll also now be using the June 14th rain date, matchups to come.

That means games five straight weeks after the Memorial Day break.

Dog days, anyone?

Howard’s latest post, which can be found here, holds out some hope that we’ll get our games in tomorrow — though that will depend on how much drying we can get in before tomorrow, and cloudy skies and cool temperatures won’t help us much on that score.
In any event, have your field crews ready. There’s an outside chance we’ll be able to get our fields in game shape, or shift to the grass. Stay tuned.

Ever heard of the flip-flop rule? Me neither.

But apparently it was instituted in one of our Week 1 games, despite neither team having any idea what it was — and, as it turned out, not knowing whether or not it was a rule we actually enforce.

Such is life early in any MMSL season. We’re all kind of feeling our way: Coaches, players, the county, and umpires. We misinterpret things. We forget stuff. In this case, an ump new to our league, a good guy by all accounts with good intentions, told one team up a good amount of runs over another team to bat left handed (or, one presumes, righty if a batter was a lefty). The intention being to cut down on runs scored.

Both coaches agreed to it. But we’ve never utilized this rule, instead relying on our teams and their coaches to be classy enough to call off the dogs, so to speak, when beating an opponent by an inordinate amount of runs.

The lesson here, as always, is an instructive one: Know our league’s rules to the best extent you can, and then communicate, communicate, communicate, with your opposing coach and the umpire. We have protocols built and put in place over 20 years, for a variety of reasons, and the MMSL runs smoothly when they’re followed.

Another head-scratcher that’s emerged in the first two weeks of the season is the distance from the pitcher’s rubber to home plate. It’s 50 feet. But apparently a new 53-foot standard has been set by an umpiring governing body and umps have been instructed to enforce it — unless we decide otherwise. So that’s what we’ll do. We’re keeping our pitching rubber at 50 feet, just as our bases are 65 feet apart, not the 70 also enforced in other leagues.

The league’s coaches can choose to revisit both of these issues in the offseason, and adopt them. In the meantime, onward and upward.