By Bob Fromer
Plant City, Florida, USA: 18 November -- Friday was a better day for Team GB at the Slowpitch World Cup: there were three more wins against a single one-run loss, better hitting, better pitching, improved defense and a prized win over Germany.
GB now leads the round-robin pool at the end of Day Two, tied with the Bahamas on won-lost record, but Great Britain has beaten the Bahamas twice. So the GB Team will go into the final two days of the tournament in good heart, with two more round-robin games to go against the bottom teams in the standings on Saturday morning.
Then it will be on to the playoffs, and what seems an unnecessarily complicated playoff structure, with a seeding round for the top four teams preceding a final Page Playoff.
But what an unexpected day Friday has been! It featured three losses by Germany, all by a single run, and three wins for Curacao, a dark horse that no one saw coming. Curacao has won five games in all, four by a single run -- and one of their victims today was Great Britain. Curacao trailed for most of the game but hung around, kept in touch, and then scored four runs in the bottom of the final inning to win by 10-9. Whatever Curacao is doing doesn’t look pretty, but it’s been very effective.
This tournament may have fewer teams than everyone had hoped for, and none from North America. But there has been no shortage of tense and exciting games, with eight so far decided by a single run. And the softball has been a lot of fun to watch!
Pool standings at the end of Day Two are:
GB (6-2)
Bahamas (6-2)
Curacao (5-3)
Germany (4-4)
Bulgaria (2-6)
Turks & Caicos Islands (1-7)
GB surge
The GB team had finished Day One on Thursday with a 3-1 record, but none of those games had been comfortable and the loss to Germany at the end of the day had been pretty comprehensive.
Assistant Coach David Lee said: “We talked about it, and we asked people to step up a few gears today and to push each other to a higher level of performance. And we feel that’s exactly what they did.”
So GB came out for their first game at noon on Friday – the first of four in a row – and dominated the Turks and Caicos Islands by 22-4.
Next was the Bahamas, a team that GB had been lucky to beat on Thursday by a single run. But this time, another dominant performance resulted in a 20-6 GB win, the worst defeat the Bahamas have suffered at this tournament over the past two years.
In both of those games, the GB offense was fairly relentless, scoring early and often and with contributions from up and down the line-up.
“It was physically tough playing four games yesterday and another four today,” David Lee said, “and the level was bound to drop at some point.”
That’s what happened against Curacao, as the GB offense failed to reach double figures and got ambushed at the end of the game.
And the offense was still fairly dormant in GB’s final game of the day against Germany, who were without their captain and talisman Wolfgang Walther in the starting line-up due to injury and were on a three-game losing streak. So a six-run outburst in the fourth inning was enough to overtake an early German lead, and then GB hung on for a tense 8-7 win that they preserved with a brilliant infield double play to close out the game.
The other element in GB’s success today was an outstanding performance from Roger Grooms, who pitched all but one inning of the four games played despite still nursing a sprained ankle, and was pretty much in control of all the teams he faced, continually getting ahead of hitters with first-pitch strikes and mixing height and location to good effect.
Roger registered an unusually high total of seven strikeouts on the day, and gave up only 27 runs over four games, 20 of them earned, for an outstanding ERA for slowpitch of just five runs per game.
Behind him, the GB offense scored 59 runs over the four games on 64 hits.
And the GB defense also improved, with today’s total of 11 errors in four games contrasting sharply with 20 errors in four games on Thursday.
GB teams, whether slowpitch or fastpitch, often get better as they get deeper into tournaments. That seems to be what’s happening here – and long may it continue.
A few more details on today’s GB games are below.
While the WBSC Softball Division is not providing webstreaming or play-by-play from this tournament, they are posting the scores of games as they happen on: http://www.wbsc.org/news/2016-wbsc-coed-slow-pitch-world-cup-scores/.
GB 22, Turks & Caicos Islands 4
Mike MacDowell led off the game for GB with an inside-the-park home run, and though the score was only 2-1 in GB’s favour after the first inning, that was as close as the Turks & Caicos Islanders were to get.
A relentless barrage of hits followed as GB scored six runs in the second inning, eight in the third and six more in the fourth.
Chris Yoxall continued his power-hitting from Thursday, belting a grand slam home run over the fence in left centre field to break the game open in the second inning, and he followed that up with a triple in the third inning, good for five RBIs in total. Kirstie Leach went three for four with three RBIs, Danielle Atkinson had a single and a triple, Sherry Kenyon had a double and a single, and everyone in the starting line-up had at least one hit.
Meanwhile, Roger Grooms restricted the Turks & Caicos offense to just four runs on seven hits over three innings, and David Lee pitched a scoreless fourth. It was a game free of tension for GB and a great way to start the day.
And more was to follow.
GB 20, Bahamas 6
GB’s win over the Bahamas at last year’s World Cup was a struggle and Thursday’s walk-off come-from-behind win was a bit of a minor miracle.
Today, however, GB belted out 26 hits in five innings, and after the first inning had ended with the Bahamas 2-1 in front, GB never gave them another chance. In the top of the third inning, GB opened up with nine hits from the first 10 batters against two different female Bahaman pitchers, Mary Sweeting and Sonya Miller. Both were accurate, but neither was able to contain the GB attack.
Roger Grooms went 4-for-4 with four RBIs and Kirstie Leach, Mike MacDowell, Kelvin Harrison and Annie Dubovec had three hits each.
The Bahamas have only lost twice in this tournament so far, and both losses have been to GB. So when it comes to the later stages of the playoffs, the Bahamas will probably still be there – and they will certainly still be a threat.
Curacao 10, GB 9
After the storming attack GB had displayed in the first two games of the day, this was where the inevitable let-down came.
GB had beaten Curacao 19-9 on Thursday morning, and were probably anticipating more of the same. But since that loss, Curacao had somehow contrived to win four of their next five games, three of those by a single run, and they were just coming off an 11-10 win over Germany that brought loud celebrations by the team and their followers.
So GB may have slightly underestimated what they were facing.
Nevertheless, GB opened the game with four runs in the top of the first inning -- a double by Kelvin Harrison was the key blow -- and they led 6-1 as Curacao came to bat in the bottom of the third.
At that point, a massive three-run home run by Andley Simmons that cleared the fence in right field – fences at this complex are set at 310 feet and are 12 feet high – brought Curacao back into the game, and GB just couldn’t score enough runs after that to put them away.
Curacao employed a defense that featured only three outfielders and, in effect, a fifth infielder just behind second base, and this clearly messed with the heads of GB batters, who tried to take advantage of the gaps this left in a massive outfield but couldn’t manage to do so.
When Curacao came to bat in the bottom of the sixth inning – the last inning based on time – GB still held a 9-6 lead, and the first batter for Curacao, Russeline Zimmerman, took a called third strike from Roger Grooms.
But then, unexpectedly, six straight hits followed, all of them driven to left centre field, and the last of them, by lead-off hitter Antersign Sherwenne, drove in the winning run.
That was a downer – and the final game of the day against Germany was coming up immediately afterward. The Germany result would make or break GB’s day.
GB 8, Germany 7
To everyone’s surprise, Germany came into this game riding a string of three straight losses. The Germans had lost 13-11 to the Bahamas in the last game on Thursday evening, lost a shocker to the Turks & Caicos Islands by a score of 7-6 on Friday morning and had just been edged out 11-10 by Curacao.
“It’s ok,” German pitcher Karim Abu-Omar muttered in passing. “It means nothing; we’ll be alright.”
And the Germans certainly opened the game against GB as if none of that had happened, going ahead 3-0 after the first inning and 5-2 after the third.
But in the top of the fourth inning, Roger Grooms retired the last three hitters in the German line-up in order on just nine pitches, and then GB mustered some offense for the only time in the game, scoring six runs with two outs in the bottom of the fourth to take an 8-5 lead.
Chris Yoxall and Danielle Atkinson had bounced out to third and short respectively to open the inning, so not a promising start. But then Abu-Omar made the mistake of walking Jeff Swindell, and with two out, Annie Dubovec took the automatic walk behind him.
And then the GB bats suddenly exploded: a triple to dead centre field by Kelvin Harrison, singles by Kat Golik and Roger Grooms, a key pinch-hit single to right field by Michelle Collier and another triple by Mike MacDowell. That was good for six runs, though the Germans threw Mike MacDowell out at the plate trying to stretch his hit to bring the inning to a close.
Now GB had to hold on to the lead, and it wasn’t easy.
Germany scored twice in the top of the fifth inning, an inning that featured a long delay while the umpires debated an interference call against German shortstop Max Zerhusen. This delay may have won the game for GB, because after that, in what had been a fast-moving game, only one more inning could be played.
Nursing an 8-7 lead, GB went down in order in the bottom of the fifth inning, and now Germany came up for their last at-bat in the top of the sixth. GB had the safety cushion of batting last, but desperately wanted to close the game out here.
And that looked more than likely, since Germany had their eighth, ninth and tenth hitters coming to the plate and Roger Grooms had already retired this group in order twice.
This time, however, German outfielder Karin Fischer led off with a soft single to right field, and now the cat was among the pigeons. And to make matters worse, Wolfgang Walther, sore back and all, was coming to the plate to pinch-hit.
But that may have been a mistake, as Walther popped out to shortstop Jeff Swindell. That brought up another pinch-hitter, Barbara Herzgen, and GB supporters were thinking about the possibility of a double play -- because failing that, the German line-up would turn over and the dangerous Max Zerhusen was waiting in the lead-off spot.
Roger Grooms ran the count on Herzgen to 2-2, and then she hit a high chopper back towards the circle. Roger grabbed it, set his feet, and fired a strike to second base, where Jeff Swindell grabbed the ball, stepped on second, and made a strong sidearm throw to first, just in time to get Herzgen.
GB had the win that took them to the top of the pool standings, and they had come through the test of four straight games in style.
But there are two days left in this competition, and on the strength of what we’ve seen so far, almost anything could happen.
Scores
Scores from Day 2 and Day 1 of the Slowpitch World Cup are as follows:
FRIDAY 18 NOVEMBER
Bahamas 19, Bulgaria 9
Turks & Caicos Islands 7, Germany 6
Curacao 15, Bulgaria 11
GB 22, Turks & Caicos Islands 4
Curacao 11, Germany 10
GB 20, Bahamas 6
Curacao 10, GB 9
Bulgaria 18, Turks & Caicos Islands 13
GB 8, Germany 7
Bahamas 25, Turks & Caicos Islands 2
Germany 19, Bulgaria 7
Bahamas 24, Curacao 4
THURSDAY 17 NOVEMBER
Germany 16, Turks & Caicos Islands 1
GB 19, Curacao 9
Bahamas 8, Turks & Caicos Islands 7
Curacao 19, Bulgaria 18
GB 14, Bahamas 13
Germany 19, Bulgaria 4
Bahamas 12, Curacao 9
GB 26, Bulgaria 11
Curacao 16, Turks & Caicos Islands 15
Germany 19, GB 10
Bulgaria 30, Turks & Caicos Islands 8
Bahamas 13, Germany 11
Photos by Pete Saunders