Ohdahorra drub Red Sox in ‘a miracle’
By Bill Tarrant
Oh, the horror!
The Red Sox scored four runs in the first inning with no outs – and then none the rest of the game - losing to the 9th-seeded Ohdahorra 17-4 on Thursday in the championship game of the Los Angeles Senior Softball League.
“We pulled off a miracle,” said veteran Ohdahorra manager Donna Sloan, whose pedestrian 5-7 team in the regular season rolled like a juggernaut through the playoffs, knocking off the first and third seeds along the way. They became the lowest-seeded team to win the championship in seven years.
“I could feel the energy ebbing in our dugout after that first inning,” Sloan told me. “I told them ‘guys, we’ve got a whole game to play. Let’s just start hitting, one inning at a time.’”
The team took that advice to heart, scratching out a 5-4 lead into the 5th inning. Then the dam broke, with Ohadahorra scoring 6 runs each in the 6th and 7th innings.
Senior softball games are generally decided by which team gets production from the bottom half of the lineup. Advantage: Ohadahorra. (The team name is a conflation of the memorable line of the Col. Kurtz character in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Oh, the horror! The horror!)
“Their bottom of their order scored 11 of their 17 runs,” Red Sox Manager Ben Franco noted. “Our bottom five was like 1 for 15.”
“We left the bases loaded twice and couldn’t get a hit to break innings open,” said Franco, whose second-seeded Red Sox had the season’s longest win streak at seven. “We definitely had our chances.”
Donna could be seen coaching up the league’s lowest-rated player, Mike Neditch, now in his 80s, telling him which side of the plate the switch hitter should bat from. He walked twice.
Ohdahorra pitcher Tim Brown deserved the game ball, Sloan said. “He thrives in the post-season. He loves the pressure. He really stepped up.”
Franco agreed. “Kudos to Timmy. He didn’t let the bottom half get on base.”
It was the first championship in the LA league for Sloan, a former Canadian star on their women’s teams, and a highly rated player in the league, who has won championships elsewhere.
“We kept advancing in the playoffs like we had nothing to lose,” she said. Thursday’s game was especially sweet because it was the first time she had her entire team together “in a long time” with no subs.
“They conducted themselves with grace and class the whole season,” Sloan said.
She found it significant that the woman manager of last year’s champions, Anita Haisten of the Killabrews, handed over the trophy to her.
“I told her to hand it to Tim first,” Sloan said.
Sloan is stepping away from managing in the fall/winter season to care for her severely disabled daughter after losing a full-time nurse.
Post a comment