High School Baseball Decides a Game With Rock, Paper, Scissors
Source – After another round of rain pushed back the start of the SCC tournament, the North Haven and Amity baseball teams took it upon themselves to get their quarterfinal matchup in as scheduled.
They did it with an epic game of Rock-Paper-Scissors at home plate of the Bob DeMayo Sports Complex.
And, after 11 tense rounds, it was the Indians who came from behind to defeat the Spartans 5-4, ostensibly advancing to the SCC semifinals and giving North Haven coach Bob DeMayo’s 900th victory. It was Amity’s first SCC quarterfinal loss in SCC baseball playoff history. …
Heading into the ninth, tied up at 3-3, both teams went to the bullpen.
The Spartans first brought in their closer Peter Spodnick. North Haven countered with Luca Lawrence out of the ‘pen.
The ninth went to the Indians as Lawrence … got Spodnick with a rock-over-scissors.
North Haven held on to the lead for a short time as Spodnick used a rock over scissors himself to tie the game.
The next draw was it, winner take all.
Lawrence went out of his comfort zone and surprised everyone in attendance with a scissor and Spodnick, who didn’t see it coming, went with paper.
I give a lot of credit to these kids because this could very easily turned into a Pussification of America story. You can just imagine a high school athletic association in this day and age, faced with Helicopter Parents raising Participation Trophy Age Millennials calling it a draw or employing some kind of arbitrary tiebreaker system. So that everyone would win, but really no one would win.
And that wasn’t good enough for North Haven and Amity. They settled it on the field. Like men. And goddamned, if I don’t admire them for it. It’s good to see in an overprotective world that competition is not dead. That some people still possess the Warrior Spirit. That sense of honor that’s as ancient as the Bushido Code of the Samurai, and as modern as Rock, Paper, Scissors.
That said, a battle like this is only worthwhile if you have a winner and a loser and unfortunately for Amity, they will never live this loss down. How does Peter Spodnick go with paper in that situation? Scissors had just lost to Rock twice in a row. Of course Luca Lawrence is going to flip that script. Because no one would ever expect to win with Rock three times in a row. You’d have to be insane to expect to see Rock again in that situation. So not to put too fine a point on it, but this will probably go down as the biggest choke job in the history of Connecticut high school baseball and I’d be surprised if every player on the Amity Indians doesn’t spend the next 30 years wallowing in their own infamous failure, living lives of quiet despair like Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai. But at least they’ll have the pride of knowing they didn’t take the pussy way out. There’s hope for America yet.