Saturday marked the end of the first season back in coaching summer baseball. If you’ve been reading along, you know how much I’ve enjoyed it; if you’ve been reading along recently, you know how rough it’s been going. After climbing to 500 at 3-3, we’ve lost 5 in a row, including 4 games this past weekend; Saturday would mark the 6th game in a row we’ve lost to end the season. At 3-9, we’ll be one of the lower seeds out of 16 teams, when the playoffs start next weekend.
Saturday was a good game, especially considering we only had 8 kids. Yes, between vacations, birthdays (where my son was at), graduations, travel sports, and not feeling too well, we fielded the minimum to start a game. Of course, this meant that we could only field 2 outfielders, and had to take an automatic out every time that 9th spot came up to bat. We went down 6-0 in this game, but it could have been worse. I let our 11th kid of the year pitch in this one; this is one of the best stats of the year IMO. 11 out of our 13 kids have pitched this season; that’s pretty cool. This kid threw strikes as well, but they were tagging him pretty good. Thankfully, our defense was good. Our right fielder is probably our most improved player; this is another one of the coolest things of the year. This kid, when I first saw him practice, was not one of our better ones; in fact, I may have said he was our worst kid. Right, wrong, doesn’t matter; he has come into his own. Not only has he made a bunch of plays on defense, his hitting has drastically improved. His first play in this game was a ball hit into the right field corner. He chased it down from right center, turned, and fired a strike on the fly to our SS who was waiting to tag the kid out at 2nd base; it was like Bo Jackson for God’s sake. His next play was one of the best of the year. Kid hits a fly ball to CF. Again, he’s running from right center to try to field it. He slides and makes an amazing play, jumps to his feet, and fires the ball back to 1B to double a kid off. Unbelievable.
We had nothing on offense though; we were facing a really good pitcher. However, once they took him out, we had our chance, and we took advantage. One of our kids hit a grand slam over the fence; this was another one of the top moments of the year. Now it was 6-4. The kids were all very excited. Unfortunately, that’s how the final score ended up. Fortunately, our “first season” is over now.
Yes, I’m talking about playoffs; playoffs ?!?! Yes, not practice, playoffs! I told the kids afterwards, it doesn’t matter if we were 12-0 or 0-12, when the playoffs start, it’s a new season; everybody is 0-0. Funny thing about it… in our 3 wins this year, we’ve beaten two of the top teams in the league; go figure. I believe; I’ve tried to get the kids to believe. I was happy when one of the kids said what he said in the postgame huddle; it went something like this. Although our record isn’t that great, we have something that nobody else has, and that’s heart… I couldn’t have said it better myself. Until next weekend…when our run begins…
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