Gardner WebLog

Before I get to my next post, I just wanted to let you know where I’m writing these recent few.  I’m sitting in the café of the South Bank Centre overlooking the Thames.  It’s finally sunny after one of the wettest Junes in London history.  There is horrible flooding up north right now so we need as many dry and sunny days as we can get.  The South Bank Centre is a great place to come and get food, drinks, or just overlook the walkway which leads down to the London Eye and Westminster Bridge.  It also leads north and east all the way down as far as you want to go, beyond the Tower Bridge.  Sorry if that sounded like I was rubbing it in, but I thought it was relevant to the blog.

            This weekend, BSUK (baseball softball UK) hosted two big games at our field in Finsbury Park.  Johns Hopkins University came out to travel around the UK and play a few games.  Since they have a JV team in addition to the varsity team (unlike most D3 schools), they brought 36 players and their families, two bus loads in all.  JHU played a team up in Scotland made of all-stars from the Scottish men’s league.  I guess it wasn’t much of a game, JHU won pretty easily.  Well, I think that left an impression, because they showed up less than an hour before the doubleheader on Friday against the Great Britain National Team.  The GB team is a combination of all sorts of players from everywhere around the world.  As long as you have a British passport, you can play for the team.  GB won both games, by a few runs.  JHU lost to Keane in the last game of the regional finals this year.  Keane went on to win the D3 World Series Championship.  JHU was expected to win both GB games easily, I guess they didn’t show up mentally.  Either that or they spent too much time in the pub the night before, probably a little of both.

            There was a big barbecue afterwards, and I got to talking with some of the JHU guys.  It turns out one of them grew up in Burke, VA and went to Lake Braddock, my rival high school, small world.  In all four years playing east coast teams at Redlands during Spring Break, we never played JHU, so I didn’t know much about them.  They have quite a successful program now and should be pretty good next year.  I guess every three years they take both squads and travel outside the U.S. to play.  They’ve been to Russia and Cuba, not bad places to go with a team.

            Yesterday I played on the all-men’s league team against the GB team.  I pitched and threw four innings of no hit baseball, pretty good pitching actually, unlike my lucky games against the second division teams.  I got yanked after four for what reason I don’t know, but I know that GB was supposed to win the game. They weren’t happy while I was pitching, but rallied off the next two pitchers and won the game by a lot.  It was mostly just a game for the coaches of the GB team to evaluate some guys and pick who they want to take to the European Championship which is coming up I think.

            Well that’s all for now, there’s more to come. The battery on my computer is dying, so I’ll write another one back home.  Thanks for checking in on the updates.

Cheers.