The Sports for the World's Children (SWC) Tournament holds a special place in the heart of the Beat as the boys in gray won not only their first tournament game, but the entire tourney in 2001. The Beat walked over Torn ACL 11-1 in the first game then showed incredible defense in beating Magilla’s Guerrillas 5-4 and 7-5 to sweep the tourney. That tournament win spring-boarded the team from a 4-4 spring to division champs in the summer and cemented the idea of mid-season tourney's as a key warm-up to the summer season. Once the Beat started adding SF Metro tournaments and more "tournament teams" entered the SWC, however, the Beat found that tournaments can be quite humbling. 

The Beat 15, Stogies 0
If there was an overriding theme of the Beat's latest venture into the annual SWC tournament, it was the mercy rule. It started off all well and good with a Saturday 9am opener against Stogies under overcast skies and on the wet grass of Moscone 1 in the Marina.

Special K smoked through the overmatched visitors on just 4 pitches to open the game and then the Beat rolled a quick nine spot in the bottom of the first and never looked back. Jacque got it started with a 2-run triple on which he almost clipped MSG's heals trying for a 4-bagger. MSG scored just in front of the play at the plate but Q was hung out to dry. Big Daddy doubled in Tim Smith to make it 3-0 and then Brian drove a ball into the gap for a 2-run homer upping the lead to 5-0. D-Rey reached on an error and Scott White hit the third long ball of the inning to make it 7-0. Austin reached on an error at first and Derek Eckert drove him in on a ground out. Mike Licari made his second appearance of the inning doubling in Gunnar to make it 9-0. That was the highlight of the Beat's weekend...the first inning of the first game.

The Beat tacked on a few more runs and entered the bottom of the 5th up 12-0. Brian, D-Rey, and Scott reached on hits and with the score 14-0, Gunnar put the nail in the coffin with a walkoff single and a 15-0 mercy ruling.

Special K turned in arguably his best game (against a very suspect opponent) by holding the Stogies to a 1-hit shutout over five innings. Austin faced only 19 Stogie batters and in spite of three Beat errors on defense, the Stogies never got a runner past second base.

Then the waiting started. After finishing the first game before 10am, the Beat had a nearly four hour layover before its next game at 1:40pm.

Kuronami 14, The Beat 1
For game two the Beat drew last summer's SWC Champions Kuronami. Watching Kuro manage a very error-prone Rhinos team earlier in the day they definitely looked beatable if the Beat could play fundamental ball and continue their hitting from game one. However while Kuronami pounded the ball through the Beat infield, the boys in gray couldn't muster a rally if their life depended on it. The Beat managed only 8 hits in the game and erased two of those by hitting into double plays.

By the time the Beat defense figured out that a rover in right field, backed by the wall of wind coming in on Moscone 2, could cut off some of those base hits and get some easy force outs at second, Kuro was already up by a dozen. The Beat finally managed a station to station rally late in the game and with two outs just dodged being shut out when Derek E drove in Big Daddy from third. But in the end, the team was the victim of the mercy rule in game two going down 14-1 against Kuronami in six innings.

Dragons 16, The Beat 1
The team was scheduled for a 10:10 start on Sunday for game three against the Dragons who also won their opener then lost to Excalibur in round two Saturday. The Beat came in knowing they had something to prove but also thinking that they'd likely seen the tourney's best team in Kuronami already. But if the team looked flat against Kuronami, they looked asleep at the wheel against the Dragons. The team committed 5 errors in the first 3 innings leading to 9 unearned runs and couldn't buy a hit on offense.

With the team down 12-0, OB came in to take a turn on the mound in the 4th. The defense seemed to settle down by then but the Beat offense remained ice cold. The Beat managed only four hits in the game and erased one of those on yet another double play. It wasn't until the top of the 5th that Mike doubled and Jacque singled him in to break up another potential shutout by making it 14-1. But in five innings the Beat only sent 19 batters to the plate, not even completing the order twice.

The Dragon's needed to plate just two more in the bottom of the 5th to end the game and did so easily with a 3-run walk-off homer to right. The Beat lost game three 16-1 in the fifth and was eliminated from the tourney.

Brian was elected as the team's 2007 SWC All-Star with a 5 for 5 performance on Saturday including 2 runs, 3 RBI and a homer. Unfortunately Brian tweaked his back on the homer and had to sit out Sunday. We could have really used his bat.

In Retrospect
What started out to be a fun-filled tourney with a 1-hit shutout victory in game one turned into a travesty as the 2007 Beat, the team that scored a franchise record 125 runs in the spring, went down with a whimper and only two runs over 11 innings and two games.

But who knows, maybe the team just needed to get those out of their system. The spring started much the same way as the Beat scored 10 quick runs in the spring opener then went 10 innings without scoring a single earned run. However the teamed turned it around in game 3 and went on to score a team record 70 runs in the next 3 games. If the team is to match this turnaround in the summer, they'll be challenged to do so. First up for the summer is the spring wild card Ronin, July 28 at 11:15am, Jackson 2.

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