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The Pro Life: Battle of The Sexes

The Pro Life

By Sara Moulton, Special to Fastpitch News

It has been a busy week for the Chicago Bandits Pro Fastpitch squad. We started the week off in Southern Illinois with a youth clinic followed by our first Battle of the Sexes game of the season. We followed up the game with our first overnight bus trip, then scattered in a few days of practice, and concluded the week with our home opening series against the newly added NPF team, the Houston Scrap Yard Dawgs. Spoiler alert, the Bandits swept the series. YAY!

Let’s backtrack to the highly anticipated Battle of the Sexes showdown which took place Monday evening at the Southern Illinois Minors ballpark. We get a lot of weird looks and curious questions when people find out we play games against baseball teams. The layout for the game is structured the same way any softball game would be played. The baseball field is constructed to match the base and pitching distance of softball.  60 foot bases, 43 foot pitching distance, and of course, our trademark yellow ball to top it all off. Overall, it’s the same game for us on the defensive and offensive side. We were however missing a temporary fence that would have benefited us at the end of the game, when one of our players launched a ball that would have been a home run but was caught. One big difference is that the boys hit with their wood bats and they bring in a professional men’s fastpitch “flame throwing, crow hopping” pitcher to face-off against us. One of the male pitchers we faced last season threw almost 80 miles per hour and we still crushed it off him. GIRLS RULE!

The game went as you probably could have imagined. The baseball guys came up eager, cocky, and swinging out of their shoes. One player even tweeted that he had been practicing hitting softballs off a tee all off-season preparing for this game. Yeah, OKAY (eye roll). Several went down swinging and looking at strike 3 calls, while others found their way on base and took an aggressive base running approach, stealing bases and taking extra bases on hits. It was a competitive game on both sides with a good amount of friendly trash talk back and forth.

We put up a good fight against the boys Monday night, but fell short of the win. The final box score was 6-4. It was the first Battle of the Sexes loss the Bandits experienced in the past 3 seasons. After the game, we signed autographs for the fans before we got on the bus and headed back to Rosemont. As disappointing as it was to lose to the boys, we returned home hungry to get back to team practices before our opening home series that weekend.

As I already mentioned, we swept our first home series against the Scrap Yard Dawgs! This week we have two practice days followed by an eight-day stretch of games. Three of the games are at home midweek against the Dallas Charge, then we are away in Pennsylvania and Ohio. We are looking forward to tacking on some more Bandit wins this week and next!

 

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