[chucksabr]

Surprising One Run Victory.

The surging Middlesbrough baseball club, new to the First Division this season after having raced up through the pyramid starting from the Third Division just two seasons ago, are showing themselves to possess quite some mettle as they attempt the impossible task of securing a championship as a phoenix club.

After Boro pitcher Bray held Fulham scoreless in the first innings of yesterday’s match at Ayresome Park, Cottagers hurler MacDougal served up a base on balls to Woods, who promptly nicked the second base on the former’s first offering to batsman Tansey. Tansey then delivered a single to the centre field which scored Woods. From that point on MacDougal did not concede either a run or a base hit, although he did walk four more. Never the less, in baseball, it is not how many base hits your team makes that determines the outcome—it is how many runs, and sometimes, one run can be enough.

And so it was yesterday as Bray took the measure of the Fulham club by conceding no runs, and incidentally, only three base hits in total. As such, it was quite a fast game, completed in a single tick under an hour and a half, quicker than even a typical football match, and before they knew it, the Middlesbrough faithful had seen their club earn the one run to nil victory, their thirty-fourth of the season against only twenty-three defeats. That is good enough to place Boro fourth on the top tier table, only two and one half lengths out of the second EOI series spot.