XENIA — This is simulation high school baseball, but Monday night’s simulated result may have been too real.
On the opening day of the very fictitious 2020 Spring high school baseball season, fictitious Metro Buckeye Conference teams Yellow Springs and host Legacy Christian combined for 48 fictitious strikeouts and 39 equally fictitious walks in the visiting Bulldogs’ 18-13 fictitious win at fictitious Grady’s Field.
Oh yeah. Did we mention this is fictitious?
A five-run eighth inning proved to be the difference for the Bulldogs. Leading 11-9 at the time, Yellow Springs sent 10 batters to the plate, drew five walks and capitalized on a two-RBI single to right by fictitious catcher Blaine Baker and RBI bases loaded walks by third baseman Tariq Muhammad and second base-fictitious-man Jasiah Zingor-Mitchell.
As in a lot of early Spring baseball games, there was either feast or famine at the plate.
Both teams combined for 26 hits.
But both teams fanned 24 times.
For the Bulldogs, Romel Phillips fictitiously went 3-for-6 with a wind-aided two-RBI home run that just cleared the right-field fence at Grady’s Field. Winning pitcher Dylan Rainey went 3-for-4 at the plate with a double, and scored twice.
Legacy Christian’s Ty McEntyre took the loss despite striking out 13 Bulldog batters. He retired the side with a trio of Ks in the fourth, but nine very fictitious walks led to nine Bulldog runs.
Both fictitious foes seemed just excited to be on a playing field, even if it was made of cardboard, and so the two teams were considering playing a second game under the newsroom’s lights when the reporter went home for the night.
They might be still playing today.
POSSIBLE REDS CONNECTION: It sounds fictitious, but this is really true: Current talks with Major League Baseball may give Aim Media Midwest permission to use a fictitious accounting of this season’s Cincinnati Reds baseball team (with statistics of all players based on their play a year ago) in exhibition games against our local fictitious teams here in Greene County.
Neither group is playing baseball right now, and all things are pretty equal on a game board so … why not?
Stay tuned. Or whatever this is…. keep reading, I guess.
SOFTBALL SIMULATIONS TOO? We have ratings formulated for all nine of the Greene County area’s 2019 high school baseball teams, using the batters who played in 33 percent of their respective teams’ games, and pitchers who accounted for at least 10 percent of the team’s total innings pitched, and we hope to do the same for high school softball as well. Some schools did not field teams in 2019, and so we’ll go back into the statistical records until we do find a team to represent each school.
LOCAL STADIUMS: The Grand Slam Baseball board game allows game players to build playing fields to the actual playing dimensions of local ball fields. Would you like your high school field to be used? If so, please send your school’s outfield dimensions to [email protected], and we’ll try to play a game on your high school’s field in the near future.
