The Saucony O’s summer office sports league is in full swing, and we have a game lineup next week that’s gonna knock your socks right out of your Jazz Lo-Pros.

Monday August 3rd & Tuesday August 4th - NYC teams plays Kubb in Central Park.

Tuesday August 4th - Chicago teams play wiffle ball in Humboldt Park and our Boston teams play steal the bacon at Boston Common (pray for no rain this time!)

Wednesday August 5th - Seattle teams play touch football under the Space Needle while our SF teams play field crumpets at Draves Field.

Now what the eff is field crumpets, you ask? Field Crumpets is a game played with two teams of players which try to score points by hitting the “crumpet” (generally one of those squishy playground balls) into the opposing team’s goal using their crumpet sticks (big fat wiffle bats). Field Crumpets is highly related to the games Field Hockey and Soccer, though it references several other sports. The game also includes various unique rules, many of which reflect the founders’ desire to emphasize fun and silliness over competition.

We look forward to the silliness!

Field Crumpets photo courtesy of fieldcrumpets.com

It was a another night of brews, bros and well-handled balls, as the inaugural Saucony San Francisco Winter SkeeBall Tournament ‘09 (S.S.F.W.S.B.T.’09) commenced at the Buckshot Bar and Gameroom. The evening ended in triumph and tears as the boisterous rookies over at SF Weekly walked away victorious for the second week in a row, first defeating Hyphen Magazine in a tight first-round match and then going on to pounce the purple-shirts over at Frog Design SF in the final round. But everybody wins at S.S.F.W.S.B.T.’09: the evening’s two first-round losers, Hyphen and KQED, consoled themselves with post-defeat games of billiards, jenga and shuffleboard, all of which were on hand inside the bar, while Frog, nursing their collective wounded pride, stuck around to play a few games of TRON and OFF-ROAD and kick back some beers. In all, a wonderfully good time.

UP NEXT: We trade in the small balls for the big ones, as we all pile into Yerba Buena for some good ol’ fashioned bowling!

I LOVE SKEEBALL.  There, I said it.  The thrill of the lights, seeing the tickets spew forth from the machine after each round, releasing a half-assed throw but then getting lucky when the ball rolled back down the lane so I had a second chance. I even had a game-playing strategy:  find my sweet spot by rolling the ball to the right side of the lane with such force to propel the ball up off the bumper and into the 50-point hole.  I don’t remember my all-time highest score, but I do remember the best prize:  a mini-fan that ran on batteries that my mom let me clip to the dashboard of her car all summer.

Tonight (Wednesday March 11) we’ll pit the San Fran players against each other in skeeball at the Buckshot Restaurant, Bar and Gameroom.   Good luck teams! If anyone scores a perfect score (450, or all 9 balls in the 50 hole), there will be a prize, but I can’t promise it will be as cool as the mini-fan!

What do “Big Ed” Morris, George Lavender, Merv Griffin and our San Francisco office teams have in common? They’re all fans of table shuffleboard! Or, at least we hope the SF teams will still be fans after the “intense” match-up we have scheduled for tomorrow night. Come watch the teams (2008 runner-up champions Hypen Magazine, Frog Design, KQED and newcomers SF Weekly) battle it out at Doc’s Clock (2575 Mission Street between 21st and 22nd Street) starting at 7p Wednesday March 4.

It was an old-fashioned shoot-out as the sun began to set early over San Francisco’s blustery Dolores Park.  On the winner’s field, the blueshirts over at KQED were preparing to face the disheveled-but-daunting boys from Revolver/Midheaven, while over at the not-winners field, the well-staffed Hyphen Magazine team were lacing up against the notoriously nimble Frog Design.

After a brief fistfight broke out near our fields–a fight, I should mention, that resulted in stab wounds and a small contingent of police officers–the games were on, and the teams, in a last-gasp effort for glory, ran onto the field with teeth bared.  However, as the daylight faded and the park’s floodlights clicked on, the two games began to unfold in very different ways: Revolver was pummeling KQED without mercy or remorse, and by the third inning the score was nearing 20-4, while it was a dead heat between Hyphen and Frog all game long.

In the end, though, the victors were clear: Revolver, in a show of great Tecate-charged force, annihilated KQED by a margin of almost fifteen points, taking home the Golden Laurels and  showing, without doubt, that they are the supreme rulers of pretty much everything (including these games).

As the season’s winners, they also all received a generous $15 gift certificate from Insound.com for each member of the sorta-hard-working team, which rules.  Hyphen, meanwhile, won by a hair, taking the win over Frog Design by one point and securing their ass-kicking reputation for generations to come.  Congratulatory high-fives went all around, and, with that, the San Francisco S.O.S.O. League season came to an explosive, semi-bloody end, and the teams all gathered around and made their way to nearby Casanova’s, where we all proceeded to celebrate with an ungodly responsible amount of beer and pizza, all courtesy of Saucony Originals.