Buccos snatch defeat from jaws of victory

sThe Buccos saved their worst for last, and in what may be a first, lost twice on the last day of the regular season in the Los Angeles County Senior Softball League.

Bucco errors littered the field like leaves after an autumn wind. Except not so pretty.

Almost everyone on the team had at least one miscue, including pitcher Bill Tarrant, who set the tone with a bad throw to second in the first inning of the first game – a contest suspended in December after a serious on-field injury that required a visit from the fire department before it finally resumed last Thursday after a series of rainouts.

“It was brutal,” said shortstop Eric Badener. “Everyone had a hand in it. There were just some spectacular errors.”

The Buccos were beating the Balboa Rockies 9-5 in the 3rd inning when that suspended game resumed, and were in a virtual tie with the Junkies for second place in the standings of the 14-team league. Run prevention had been a feature of the team's’ success, yielding an average of 9 runs a game – more than a run better than the league average.

But in this league, one error can often jump to another, like a wildfire spreading in the nearby San Gabriel foothills.

“I was reminded of that famous Pogo cartoon from 1970: ‘We have met the enemy and he is us’” Tarrant said.

A joint batting practice before the game seemed to favor the Rockies, as Mike Giangreco’s team scored 9 runs in the final frame to crush the Buccos 20-12 in the suspended game.

The discombobulated Buccos then trudged to an adjacent diamond at Hjelte to to face a suddenly hot Archies team, losing that contest 12-9 on more defensive lapses and weak Archie dribblers and popups that became hits.

The last player in the Buccos lineup, the 3-rated Mark Weber, turned in one of the better hitting performances on the day, going 3 for 5 after getting some coaching on hitting fundamentals just before the first game. The 58-year-old Weber, a former punk rocker, had not played organized ball before joining the senior league several years ago. The simple fix: plant his back foot and stride toward the ball with his left, putting his 300-pound body into the swing.

“The batting practice certainly benefited Weber,” Eric noted. “He barrelled everything. If the rest of us had backed him up, we’d be celebrating.”

The double loss dropped the Buccos into the 5^th seed. The Killebrews finished 12-1, head and shoulders above the rest of the League, followed by Softball Junkies, Mudhens and Dukes.

That’s all the bad news. The good news is that according to the laws of the universe, last week’s yin failure will surely be followed by this week’s yang success and the baseball gods should be kinder to us in the playoffs.