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Sports

Marple Newtown Baseball Team Drowns Out Early By Rain

The Lions and Tigers tried to battle it out through a freezing downpour, but the officials called it quits halfway through leaving the Tigers on top 5-2.

MEDIA–Instead of team colors, the most dominant feature among the spectators of Thursday's game was umbrellas, and with good reason. The game between and started out misting, and quickly upgraded (or downgraded, depending on how you look at it) to a torrential downpour.

The rain made for a sloppy, clumsy game on both sides, which nobody, no matter how good an athlete, could have avoided. Runners were bogged down, outfielders missed pop flies, bases were overthrown and the ball itself might as well have been a round lump of wet soap.

In the first inning, neither team made it past second base.

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In the second inning, both teams went 1-2-3-out.

In the third inning, the Tigers took advantage of the sloppy conditions and broke loose with a succession of deep line drives that circulated runners around the bases and ran the score up to 4-0 before their third out.

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Penncrest tried to answer in their half of the inning, but the first two batters struck out and the third walked. The next knocked a single into the outfield which was thrown over the first baseman's head and got one of Penncrest's runners to third base, but the Lions failed to bring him home.

In the fourth inning, there were batters hit by pitches, stolen bases, more overthrown errors, and Marple Newtown sent another runner home. Penncrest managed to punch out a few hits in succession and got one guy around the horn to break the shutout, but still trailed 5-1.

In the bottom of the fifth inning, the Lions managed one more run before the officials decided to finally call it quits, receiving vastly different reactions from spectators.

Some were more than happy to pack it up and get to someplace warm and dry, and some were incensed at having stuck it out for half the game only to be denied the second half.

The officials were insistent, and were right to be so. After two hard hours of rain on top of an entire day of drizzle, the pitcher's mound resembled a collapsed chocolate mousse cake and provided treacherous ground for pitchers to try and throw on.

With safety and sense belatedly prevailing, the 5-2 score hung in the saturated air, much to the disappointment of two teams who seemed determined to slug it out to the cold, bitter end.

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