Last night our softball team, the Magelistics (pronounced Magilistics), were in danger of becoming the Detroit Lions of city league softball.
The 2008 Detroit Lions finished the NFL season 0-16. The Lions are the only NFL team to go 16 regular season games without at least one win.
The 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the original losers with a perfect 0-14 that year.
Going into last night’s double header the Magilistics we were 0-12.
Could we do it? Could we pull off the impossible? Could we complete the perfect losing season?
It sounds easy, but to get to that point we had to work hard.
We didn’t just lose.
We made losing look bad… or good, depending on how you look at it.
Losing had become our unique art form.
When we were ahead late we’d lose on the other team’s last at bat.
When we had chances to win late, we’d leave our winning runs on base.
Here are the scores of our 12 loses:
20-2
19-9
11-0
13-3
10-6
16-10
10-7
16-4
19-10
9-8
9-8
So there we were last night, with a chance to make history.
We promptly lost our first game 15-5 and that set up a historic showdown.
It was going to be a rematch between the second to last place team in our league and us.
Sofa King, was a juggernaut.
They were 2-11 going into the final game. Did I mention, they had defeated us 11-0 in our only other meeting of the year?
We came out hot and at one point we were up 19-7 with a chance to end the game early with the 10 run rule (up by 10 runs or more after the 5th inning).
Sofa King fought back and after five and a half innings led 23-19.
The Magilistics would not be denied however and scored 10 runs in the bottom of the sixth.
Leading 29-23 going into the seventh the Magilistics had a chance to close out an imperfect season at 1-13.
The final inning started off rocky as Sofa King’s lead off batter reached base on an error.
The Magilistics finished strong though, ending the game and recording their first win of the season.
So there you have it, an imperfect end to a nearly perfect season.
It feels good to be 1-13.
Next up, playoffs.
I think we are primed for a deep run this year.
Great read. We are peaking!!! Tournaments are all about momentum and what we lack in skill, intuition, strength, consistency, unity, uniforms, and general well being we make up for with momentum.
Couldn’t agree more Jeff. We will surprise a lot of teams with our moxy.