24 innings of baseball (Day 24)

My second day of working at home seemed to be a little more productive than the first.

I started by heading out to the pool to get in some tanning time. Rough day, right? It's pretty much impossible for me to sleep in here, despite that I've improved in the shuteye department, so mornings are a good opportunity for me to work on bronzing up my skin a little bit.

I assure you I worked harder than that throughout the day though.

Because of the Bandits game being suspended last night, the schedule for the weekend is now two games today (Friday) in the form of a day-night doubleheader, two games tomorrow in the form of a twi-night doubleheader, and the final game on Sunday afternoon. The first game today began at 10 a.m. local time because Sydney is an hour ahead of us and they were having a school day event or something.

I tried to watch the game on Ustream, which is the internet-streamed version with one camera angle and commentators that may or may not know a whole lot about baseball, but that didn't work. I had it going for a little while, but only a couple innings into the game my feed cut out and I had to resort back to watching the pitch-by-pitch on GameCast and the play-by-play on the game recap page. As painful as listening to some of the people on Ustream is, watching a game the way I did is slightly worse.

To add to that, the first game went into extras. Ordinarily, I love extra innings. It's free baseball! What could be better? But when you can't actually watch the game and instead you're reading it on a website page that you constantly have to refresh, it's not the same.

And the extra innings just kept on coming. I think I must have jinxed myself in an earlier journal when I mentioned that the longest games I have ever been to have all stopped in the 14th innings. The first game between the Bandits and the Blue Sox went 15. The bullpens were obviously very effective for both teams, essentially pitching a whole game themselves. SJ made his official debut as a Bandit. He got through one inning alright and then came back for another one that wasn't as pretty. But no damage was done, because Durket came in and got him out of a jam. The American boys teaming up and taking charge. Not really, but neither of them gave up any runs, allowing the game to continue further.

Unfortunately the Blue Sox won the game with a walkoff single. I'm pretty sure the third base coach was telling the runner coming from second base to hold up but he clearly didn't listen if that was the case. I can't be sure about that though, since I was watching the game by reading the play-by-play. They don't include interesting little tidbits like that.

So after 15 long innings and a loss I had to make my attempt at writing the game story and then getting it online. The story wasn't too hard to write, although I'm not asking for any judgements on its quality, but the website was another problem. This whole website management thing is probably going to haunt me forever. I thought I had everything figured out but I ran into trouble again when trying to get a picture up with the story.

My computer doesn't have a program that allows me to crop pictures to the aspect ratio that they need to be apparently. And I tried to download (or upload, I'm not good with this computer talk) Photoshop from a disc we have at the office, but my laptop wouldn't accept that either. So because of the combination of those things, I can't put a proper picture up on the website. For a little while, we had an oddly shaped picture up with my story because it was the best I could do. But eventually, Carl got back to my panic-filled text messages and told me to email Melody, the league's website specialist. He said she would be happy to help me get stuff up on the Bandits site this weekend. I don't know if this is true or not, but I had to ask her for her assistance either way.

I did manage to do one thing right though (I think) and that was to send the story out to the media. Carl had left me with a long list of email addresses and another long list of instructions of what to do with them and I think I was able to get through that without any problems. I guess I will find out when Carl gets back home but since I didn't need to crop any pictures for that I feel like I should have been okay.

I was also trying to put up a story from one of the writers for the team, Anna, and I was having no luck with that either. But it was supposed to go up today so I was trying my best. I ended up just putting all the information that I could into our newsroom website, minus pictures, and emailing Melody to see if she could fix my problems.

Melody actually did seem happy to do it, and she didn't make me feel like an idiot along the way either, so that was a bonus. She was the woman with whom Carl and I had met when we went to the Gold Coast. Obviously I didn't do enough learning there. But she cropped the pictures and finished putting both the game story and Anna's story on 22-year-old right-hander Andrew Marck online for the world to see. My saviour.

By the time I was through with that ordeal the day had worked itself into the early afternoon. I only had a few hours before the next game was going to begin. It is starting to seem that on days like this when I have to write the game recaps that I don't love baseball as much but really I do. I just wish I was able to actually see the games that I write about, have a glimpse at the action, and not just read what every pitch is on GameCast. It's not an ideal situation but it doesn't make me love the game any less. Just so you know.

I had to take a break from everything to go and find a place where I could buy more phone minutes. My phone had started to send me text messages telling me that I was running low on money and I didn't figure it would be ideal to run out of minutes during a time when I am using my phone the most. Since I don't have any of my three friends around me at all times it makes sense that I would be sending more texts and making more phone calls. So I headed off to the post office because I thought I had seen some phone cards there when I went yesterday. I did indeed, and bought myself a whole bunch more air time. Basically that was my only success of the day.

I stopped and got a few more groceries on my way home since I always just buy one or two things at a time and not enough to actually feed myself for a sustained period. But I'm not starving or anything. Don't worry mom. There's still lots of bread and peanut butter to go around.

When I got back home I ate some of the food I had just picked up, watched some TV and worked on some writing. It didn't seem to last long though because before I knew it the second game of the day was starting. I tried to remember where the day had gone but then I did. The first game was a whopping 15 innings and then I spent hours panicking over website management. Couldn't wait for the next game.

Game 2 was actually a lot better than the first for the Bandits. They came back from a 4-1 deficit to win it by scoring runs in each of the last four innings. It was much quicker than the first game too, going the regulation nine innings. Steven Chambers started the game for Brisbane but he picked up a no-decision after giving up the four runs to the Blue Sox early. The bullpen came through once again for the Bandits, though this time they had a little help from the offense.

During the game I got a few texts from Coshi and Gonzo about how great of a time everyone was having. Just what I needed. They met and at one point were sitting with Luke Hughes though so that was a little cool. Didn't help my jealousy over the fact that they were there and I am here, but I made my decision and now I have to deal with it. Gametime for them, GameCast for me.

I wrote the second game story more quickly than the first and managed to get it out to the media relatively quickly, though that is by my own standard, so I'm not really sure how fast I actually was. And I got everything I could up into the newsroom site, ready to ask Melody for her help yet again. I tried to reassure her via email that I wouldn't ever be asking for this much assistance ever again. She let me know that she's going away on holidays starting Monday so even if I did ask for her to fix all my problems again after this weekend, she probably wouldn't be able to. Thank goodness Carl will be back. He hasn't had enough of dealing with my problems obviously. So Melody was my saviour once again and the second story went online as well. I'd call that a successful day.

I didn't really know what to do myself at that point. It was only like 10 o'clock on a Friday night and I was finished working. So what did I do? I started transcribing. I still had the interview with Justin Erasmus from Tuesday night's practice game that I hadn't done anything with. And since we don't have another story to go up tomorrow outside of the game recaps I figured it would be a good opportunity for me to get another one of mine up there.

As much as I complain about GameCast, I think I seem to be whingeing (boom!) more and more about transcribing as well. It's really not that bad and I need to just suck it up. When I was doing my year of grad school in Sports Journalism we often had guests that would come in and talk for an hour at a time and we were supposed to record them and then go home and write a story about them, using things they'd said. Though I don't think many of my classmates transcribed the whole hour of talking, I always did. Okay, I know they didn't because they thought I was crazy for doing so. But I figured it would help me out later when I was doing such a tedious task for real. And it has. Now that I've transcribed so many hour-long interviews with people it seems like a piece of cake to do 10 minutes. It still sucks a little bit, but I'm over it (maybe) and I'll try to stop complaining about it each time I do it.

It didn't take long though because it was only about a 10-minute interview, although Erasmus did talk really fast, making the transcription longer than usual for that length of time. But I got through it and was able to start writing the story. I didn't get very far though, a little bit because of writer's block and a little bit because I kept getting text messages from drunk boys about Luke Hughes.

I decided to pack it in and hope for better luck tomorrow with the Erasmus story. Also, if you haven't read my story on SJ, it's up on the Bandits website and can be found here:
http://web.theabl.com.au/news/article.jsp?ymd=20111201&content_id=26064644&vkey=news_t4065&fext=.jsp&sid=t4065

Better luck for me tomorrow I hope.