Just another day in the life, as Saturday rolled around. We had our baseball game smack dab in the middle at 1pm. It was a beautiful day in Chicago for baseball. Typically, the early season games are hit and miss with the rain; last weekend we were lucky to be playing on one of the fields not impacted by the rain the previous evening and early morning. It ended up being our first win of the season. At 1-1, we looked to go over 500…
As we arrived at the park, I saw the other team warming up; they looked professional. It appeared that their whole team was there practicing. They had one of those nets you can hit into. OK, I’m scared of you… Meanwhile, our squad was just showing up; there was a kid here, a kid there. Slowly but surely our team arrived, and headed in the outfield to play some catch, while the other team took the field. We eventually took our ground balls before the game began.
This team did turn out to be “professional”, or at least apparently had a lot of travel baseball players. Twice early in the game they pulled their pitchers in the middle of an at bat. Yes, the whole magic pitch count of 20, which, if staying under, allows the kid to pitch the next day. I think it’s a bit ridiculous, and annoying, to pull a kid mid at-bat, but… those are the rules. You see, that’s why, on draft day, we tried to avoid taking a lot of travel players. Sure, the travel players are the “better” players, but… I’d prefer to roll with as few as possible. We did take one with our first overall pick; have to have at least one “stud” on the team. Meanwhile, we had 3 more pitchers make their first appearance of the season in this one. Yes, so far in 3 games, we’ve had 9 different kids throw the ball; yeah, 9 out of 12 kids have already pitched on the season. I believe we have one more kid who wants to pitch; they’ll get their chance on Sunday. Anyways, back to the battle with the professional team.
It was a good game. In fact, the score was 4-4 in the 6th inning; we play 7 innings. Our 3rd pitcher, in his 2nd inning of work, started losing the plate. Few walks later, and a timely hit, and we were in trouble. I pulled him, and another kid came in to close the door. The damage had been done; we were losing 7-4. Should I have taken the other kid earlier? Personally, I like to give the kids a little rope, at least this early in the season; I like to see what they got. Can they bounce back from a couple walks? Can they “clutch up” as my son likes to say, with runners on base? I like to see how the kids respond. This kid in particular, has proven to be pretty good thus far this season overall, but pitching in this inning was tough; that’s OK. He was down on himself; I made sure he kept his head up… he’ll be just fine.
Yeah, so we took the L 7-4. As we went through the handshake line, one of the other coach said “good game”… but the way he said it… and how he nodded afterwards, like I can’t believe it was this close, I thought we would have wiped the field with your team… kind of pissed me off. I don’t know; I typically don’t read much into that, and normally don’t care anyways. Maybe we’ll meet again… and this team filled with hardly any travel kids can give them a better game… Back on the field Sunday.
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