Greetings from Bay City Michigan home of the 2008 Little League Michigan State Tournament. Bay City is located approximately 115 miles north of Detroit and about a three hour drive from my home in Kalamazoo. I arrived this afternoon around 4:00 PM and checked into the hotel along with 16 teams of 11 and 12 year old boys, their coaches, parents, siblings and anyone else that might be part of their entourage. This equals to about 350 people and add this to the local volunteers, umpires, scorekeepers, grounds people, board members, etc. there could be well over 700 people attending this week long tournament.
After checking into my room and meeting up with my fellow umpire from Kalamazoo, Pat Griffin, we changed into our umpire uniforms and headed off to the Opening Ceremonies and Banquet which was held at the Saginaw Valley State University. As each team arrived in uniform they were grouped by their District (1-16) and then led my us umpires, paraded into the banquet hall which was actually the basketball gym. Each team held their District Champion flag as they filed in and were announced and you could tell by the expressions on their faces, they were excited to be here.
After the banquet we all moved back to the hotel for the Manager and Coach meeting. This meeting is used to go over all the Little League rules once again and to go over any special situations that might come up during the tournament. For example, the weather. All of the games are scheduled to run for 2 hours and begin on the hour (12, 2, 4 6) and as any umpire will tell you, this is a very tight schedule. Would we like to have games completed in 2 hours? You bet. Is it realistic? Probably not. Then add in a thunderstorm or two and you have a nightmare in the making. Add another ingredient into the mix that neither of the fields we're playing on have lights... well, you can see what I'm talking about. It's going to be very interesting week.
I have 3 games out of the 4 that are scheduled at the Bay City SW Little League complex. The first is at noon, followed at 4 and the last one at 6. I'll be at 3rd base for the first game, 1st base for the second and have the plate for the third. My plate game will be between the host team, District 14 Bay City SW and District 7, St. Clair. You can keep track of how the games are progressing by visiting the Michigan State site at www.llbmichigan.org and click on the brackets. Now don't expect things to be updated too quickly. I also maintain the State site and the brackets for all the tournaments going on in Michigan. So as you can see, I'm going to be a bit busy this week.
Games begin today with the Opening Ceremonies and then the fun really begins!
