Saturday was the last day of our vacation; it was time to come home. I was telling my son… I love, love, love going on vacation, but… I also love coming home. It’s great to have a home that you’re happy to come back to. Yet, we wouldn’t be back in time for our semifinal baseball playoff game. We needed the team to win one more game, then we’d be back in the mix on Sunday for the start of the Championship Series. I just knew that if we could win this semifinal game, we would win it all! My son couldn’t wait to play on Sunday. I told him he’d be pitching again, and the coaches knew to use whoever was necessary on Saturday. He had been warming up his arm all week… tossing that ball around in the pool all day every day. I was excited too. As we got to the airport in Punta Cana, I was able to tune in via Game Changer for the start of the game.
The airport was really nice; they even had a little live entertainment. They had this store of sports gear for anything and everything Dominican, including the local baseball teams; I thought my son would like one of those shirts, but he wasn’t interested. I remember the last time we were here, 9 years ago, the airport was like a little hut. Now, it was a regular old airport; you could tell everything was relatively new. The tourism business must be good. I’m sure during COVID it was even OK, considering the amount of time folks would be spending outdoors while on this type of vacation. Anyways, nice airport; I wanted to hit up the Wendy’s in the food court, but I resisted… haha.
We were facing arguably the best pitcher in the league on Saturday, throwing upwards of 70mph on his heater; we were up to bat first. The top of the first went about as good as it could… the kid couldn’t throw strikes. He eventually ended up walking in a run, and we took a 1-0 lead; more importantly, his pitch count was through the roof, and wouldn’t be in there for that many innings. The bottom of the first didn’t go as well. This kid did the damage at the plate, hitting a 2 run dinger off arguably our best pitcher; down 2-1 after the first. Watching this game on my phone, like ESPN gamecast, was killing me; it was worse than watching the Cubs, meaning, I was living and dying on every pitch… talking to the phone, like I’d be talking to the kids. I hoped our pitcher, and the rest of the team, put that big blast behind them as soon as they got back in the dugout. I was able to watch until the bottom of the 3rd inning; as we boarded the plane, the game was tied 3-3, and their best pitcher had just been taken out. At that point, I knew it would be a nail biter. We would find out the end result in about 5 hours… wheels up!
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