Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Best baseball all year

Monday, I came home early from our three-day multi-family camping trip (briefly: heat, beach, heat, food, and heat at the Upper Canada Migratory Bird Sanctuary) to coach our minor baseball A's in the extra innings of a tie game called on account of darkness Thursday. The other team could not field enough players and had to forfeit, putting us in the final losers' bracket game against a team that beat us 8-5 previously.

We had a bit of infield practice instead of our game in anticipation of yesterday's losers' final.

Wow, did it pay off. Our team played the best defensive game of baseball I've seen and that includes the B-level tournament select members participated in a few weeks ago. Our pitchers threw strikes. Our two pitchers got through the six innings in 80 pitches.

Our shortstop, who had never played baseball before mid-summer, played a flawless game. Our third baseman likewise. Our outfielders got the ball back to the infield quickly. I don't want to dwell on errors, but on defense we made only two: a misguided throw home instead of to the cutoff man that allowed a runner to advance to third and a ground ball that our second baseman should have grabbed. Every other ball in play was either a solid hit or, more often, turned into an out. It was a spectacular game to watch.

We need to work on our hitting, though. We won only 2-1. Part of that was poor baserunning. We handed over three crucial outs on the basepaths. One was our first batter of the game, who walked and took a step off first base to be tagged by the first baseman. I've seen better sportsmanship, but not better gamesmanship. Another out was a foolish attempt to steal third on the runner's own initiative, and another was a baserunner who took off for third, stopped, and returned to second as the runner from first slid in to that base. Those outs may have cost us runs; regardless, we still need better hitting.

We play in the championship Saturday and we'll need to win twice to be champions. We can do it.

If you want to see photos of our boys, go to this page and scroll through. That's Child Three with the wide stance at the plate. Here he is catching. In this one, you can see me with mono coaching third base and scoring.

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