Rays sharpen their skills with a game of pingpong

Victoria Romero enjoys meeting the new faces at the Sunrise Table Tennis Club, and what better way to meet them than during a friendly match, right?

So one night in November, Romero asked the quiet gentleman who signed in only as "Andy" if he wanted to play.

They played best-of-five, 11 points a game. Romero swept the match.

"She shook me to the core, man," Andy Sonnanstine said. "I didn't go back for a couple of weeks."

Sonnanstine fancies himself an above-average pingpong player. He said he played more than 300 matches during his junior year in college and lost once. He said he ruled the clubhouse table in 2006 when he played at Double-A Montgomery.

Sonnanstine did some research after last season and realized his best years as a pitcher followed offseasons when he played a lot of pingpong.

That's how Sonnanstine found himself at the St. Pete Beach Community Center, mixing with national champions like Ty Hoff.

"I got to be honest, after going a couple of times I'd have to psyche myself up to go there," he said. "It was like walking into Murderer's Row, because I've never been beat like that consistently. I absolutely walked into a buzz saw. It was an ego check. I think getting one of those every now and then is good, it keeps you grounded. I'm really glad I did it."

On Saturday morning, Romero, Hoff and three other members of the club showed up at Charlotte Sports Park and displayed their talents on a pair of pingpong tables set up in the indoor batting cage.

Hoff played David Price and Joe Maddon. Jeff Niemann, Elliot Johnson and Wade Davis also joined the fun.

It's not unusual to see pingpong tables in a baseball complex. The Dodgers had them at Dodgertown. The Angels held tournaments during instructional leagues.

"For two purposes," Maddon said. "Hand-eye coordination and just purely for the competitive component."

Sonnanstine said there are a lot of similarities between pitching and table tennis.

"The best way I can describe it is attacking an opponent and trying to break that opponent down by changing speeds, using different spins and deception in different angles, which is extremely similar to what my job is," he said.

"It's about fooling your opponent," said Bill Robins, president of the St. Peter Beach chapter of the Sunrise Table Tennis Club. "Andy understands that."

Sonnanstine's offseason training is a bit unusual. It includes yoga and kickboxing, darts and archery, sporting clays and billiards. After the football field was drawn on the turf at Tropicana Field, Sonnanstine would kick field goals, figuring that activity would strengthen his plant leg.

"A 50-yarder was my best," he said.

Sonnanstine sent an email to Romero a few weeks ago, inviting her and some of the club members to Port Charlotte. Romero said she didn't recognize the name since Sonnanstine only wrote his first name on the club's sign-in sheet.

She forwarded the email to Robins, who told her Andy did indeed pitch for the Rays.

"I looked him up on the Internet," Romero said. "When I saw his picture I was like, 'I remember this player. I beat him.' I think he's been practicing, because he's much better."

Sonnanstine said he has to. He wants to pitch better this season. And he wouldn't mind winning a few more matches next time he visits the club.

"A lot of the members are senior citizens, and the thing I didn't take into account was our generation has PlayStation 3 and Xboxes and all these new technologies that can hold your attention, and these guys who were in the Army and Navy for 20 years and in the barracks where there were eight tables and 300 guys with nothing to do, these guys are going to be nasty," he said. "I didn't put that together and I didn't know what I was walking into. That definitely took me down a peg or two."

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