April Fool's Day concluded a week in which the weather was a joke all its own, daytime highs in the 30s on Monday gave way to temps in the 70s on Thursday. By Friday we were back down into the 50s and even chillier in the evening for the ballgame at McCaskey. The club has several returnees from 2021 on the roster but any time a program has a new coach there is always the feeling of "starting over". At 7:00 game time it was 47 degrees with the winds blowing out to leftfield at 25 miles per hour. Cedar Crest was the opponent, they scored four times in the first inning and carried an 8-0 lead into the sixth. The Red Tornado got on the board in the bottom of the sixth when Braulio Rivera doubled and scored on Cole Hatfield's single, in the seventh Alex Ruiz and Orion Frailey reached on base hits, Rivera's RBI single scored Ruiz with run #2 and Frailey touched home on Hatfield's second RBI hit of the night. The final score was 8-3, Tobe Kuntz started on the mound and took the loss with Elias Morales working in relief. The ballclub had played one previous home game I missed because of hockey in Reading (first time for that since 2017), the next home game is on April 6 and I'm out of that one as well. When I came out of the PA booth after the game the wind hit me right in the face all the way on the walk to my car, it was C-O-L-D. On Saturday Jenny, her mother and I had our usual lunch date, in late afternoon we headed northeast to Allentown for the first time in better than three years for an AHL Phantoms hockey game. The Phantoms started play in the Lehigh Valley in 2014, we try to get there once a season. In previous years we've seen the Manchester Monarchs, Portland Pirates, Springfield Thunderbirds, Toronto Marlies and (most recently in November of 2018) Binghamton Devils as opponents, Springfield and Toronto are the only two from that group still in the AHL. We had tickets for a game the following season which never happened because of The BS, in '20-21 the Phantoms played a shortened schedule with all kinds of restrictions in place and I simply elected not to bother. The Phantoms roster features eight players with Royals connections, six of them were in uniform: Matthew Strome, Max Willman, Charlie Gerard (a Royal briefly earlier in the season) and Ryan MacKinnon plus goalies Felix Sandstrom and Pat Nagle (Kirill Ustimenko and Garrett McFadden were not in the lineup). In the game itself the Phantoms rallied from a 2-0 deficit for a 3-2 win over the Utica Comets (New Jersey Devils affiliate), ex-NHLer Garrett Wilson scored twice including the game-winner with Ryan MacKinnon adding a single marker for winning goalie Felix Sandstrom. By the time I got home it was 12:30am which was OK because there was absolutely nothing going on Sunday. Take care, thanks for reading.
