Game 1: Rox (Irvine, CA) 7, Minneapolis Millers 3

First off, a word about competition at Cooperstown. No Minneapolis Millers team will ever win this tournament. There are too many teams that are put together for this occasion, too many teams who consider the trip a waste if they don't win it, too many teams filled with parents willing to die trying to get their boys to the majors, too many teams who consider cross-country trips for tournaments like this old hat. If we can get a team to Thursday, meaning, a team into the final 16 of bracket play, that would be something. We haven't done it yet.

In baseball, you never say never, getting to Thursday is beyond our expectations. We are an AA team, and while we are a good AA team, the  Minnesota AA teams that have gone before us this year haven't had a ton of success. 4 of them lost all their games, although we are better than all of them.  Bloomington had a good tournament, won 3 games. If we can win 3, it will be a successful tournament.

Going in, we figured there would be a few teams we were flat out better than, and 1-2 dozen teams we had virtually no shot of beating. At some point, we'll run into one of these teams and be on the business end of a thrashing. It happens to nearly all Minnesota teams. The rest of the teams would be either pretty close to us or teams we could beat, but we'd have to play 6 excellent innings to do so.

Rox falls into the last category. We played very well, but not great. There was room for improvement, and that room for improvement was the difference between giving Rox a good game and beating them. In the first  inning, we got two quick outs, but then Rox hit a homerun. The fences at Cooperstown are only 200', so what would be routine fly at most Minnesota parks leaves the field in Cooperstown. After the homer, the team seemed to tighten up a bit, and made two quick errors followed by another HR. The second inning one more HR, and some more solid hits made it 7-1 after 2. It looked like our first game would end in destruction, but we kept them off the board after that. In the last inning, we got some hits, and combined with some errors on Rox, cut it to 7-3 and got the tying run to the on-deck circle. At this point, Rox brought in their dragonslayer, and he ripped through the heart of our order. Good game, not a win, but showed the kids they belonged here.