Fields of Screams: 2017 youth baseball/softball thread

Tonight we played in the first night game in league history and won 15-7 against the winless team. They've improved. They almost won their first game the other night, dropping a 19-18 decision to a team with 6 or 7 wins.

My pink-haired pitcher is still nursing a sore ankle but pitched a beautiful game and fielded her position as well as one could expect on the ankle. My third baseman made 2 impressive plays on hard grounders, and we hit the ball and took 15-20-25 bases, and pretty much did what we needed to do.

We're 8-5 -- winners of 6 of 8 -- and finish the regular season tomorrow at home.

The tournament starts Saturday.

 

My daughter's softball team lost 5-4 in the finals. Pitchers are limited to 4 out of the 6 innings and our best pitcher threw a shutout in the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th, but our second pitcher gave up 5 in the bottom of the 3rd.

With the bases loaded and no outs in the top of the 5th, my daughter had her best swing of the season and hit a hard line drive right at the opposing second baseman. The three girls on base might still be going and the other team turned a triple play. A foot either way and we score at least 2 and maybe 3, but such is life.

 

Last night in the season finale, on our home turf, we played a great game and won 18-5 for our third win in a row, 6th in 7 games -- and 9th overall.

In 24 hours we outscored two opponents 33-12.

In 14 games we have outscored our opponents 179-133.

Last night we played a team that has 6 wins and the girl whose mom pulled her off my team just before the season began. Funny thing happened last night, twice. Her nickname this year was going to be Sparkle, which she had put onto the back of her game shirt. But then mom pulled the daughter. At the same time one of the newbies arrived so we gave her Sparkle's shirt. She became Sparkle. She also went from not knowing a thing about softball to becoming our starting shortstop in about 3 weeks. Who cares if she's the only lefty shortstop in the league. She gets it.

In her first at-bat, the old Sparkle hits a hard grounder to the new Sparkle, who fields it cleanly and guns to first for the out.

In her next at-bat, the old Sparkle hit a goddamn laser ... straight at the new Sparkle, who moved a step or two and snagged it without blinking.

I felt bad for the old Sparkle because she's a sweetheart but any thoughts of her dissipated in seconds as I saw the new Sparkle smiling so wide behind the fielding mask. She's a natural.

My third baseman also snagged a screaming liner. The biggest play was a 3-throw relay to gun down a runner at home for the final out of top-1 to stop the bleeding at 2 runs.

My pink-haired 5th-grade pitcher calmed down after that (she walked 3 in the frame) and threw another gorgeous game. She's the best pitcher in the league, and I get her for another year.

My 7th-grader smashed a grand slam in bottom-1, her 13th homer of the season. We had 12 or 13 hits and showed lots of patience to draw several walks, and took every base we could, and just played a great game.

We open the weekend tournament Saturday with 2 games, against last night's team and then against "The Red Team" -- which has won 35 or 40 in a row, including 4 against us this season.

We're 9-5.

Last season, we lost every game.

 

Loving how much you are enjoying coaching.

 

Over my 15-odd seasons of coaching, the most really fun teams to coach were the ones that really had to work hard to improve -- and did.

It really wasn't all that much fun to coach juggernaut teams which rolled over the league (I had a couple of those), because if you win, it's no big deal, because everybody expected you to win anyway. And, as a coach, you get the feeling that nothing YOU did made any big difference, except making sure you got the right players on your roster.

Also, most dominant teams in youth/kids sports are due to the dominance of one or two great pkayers, and that's almost always the result of some great natural gift (size or speed) which again you probably had little to do with.

It's a lot more fun to coach a team that is maybe a bit above average, with three or four really good players instead of one or two superstars, and several decent-to-good role players who end up being real contributors.

I had the most fun coaching teams which were 3rd-4th in a really tough 12-team league, and having opposing coaches say, "we always hated playing you guys because you were always prepared for everything we did, you always brought in something new we hadn't seen before, and you always played real hard no matter who was in the game or what the time/score was; we could never relax."

Because we usually didn't have all-league superstars, there wasn't much dropoff to our second- and third-rank players; we never had 3-4 really awful scrubs sitting down the end of the bench whom we dreaded putting in the game.

What was really fun was taking some kids who may have fit the "scrub" description early in the season, finding something they could do well, and turning them into decent players you weren't petrified to put in the game.

 

To pick up off that last graf: many youth baseball / softball leagues have rules requiring players to switch positions every inning. How many people here have similar rules in their leagues?

 

I've never seen that in any league where I played, coached or observed.

The closest I can think of are rules that all players play one inning in the infield, and that all players sit out one inning.

At least in baseball, I'd be surprised if that exists.

 

In the Starrville softball and baseball leagues up to U12, players must change defensive positions every inning.

They've had proposals to go further: to put maximums/minimums on innings played in the infield vs. outfield, and also to prohibit players from playing the same position twice in a game.

So far, those have been mostly shot down.

 

As I predicted in my earlier post, our All-Star team is not doing so well. Went 2-and-BBQ in first two "qualifier" tournaments and finished third in this past weekend's last tuneup tournament before the real sectional tournament this weekend. Talked to one of the coaches and he said pitching is really weak (not shocked at all because they definitely loaded up on hitting) and that there's some in-fighting among teammates and parents.

I still think if they had let the championship team just stay together and represent our league, they would have done better. But maybe I'm mistaken.

 

Haven't heard "2 and a Q" in years.

So we had some nice breakthroughs with the bat in practice tonight, especially the girl with a tough life who's really lazy (but will move if properly motivated). I do the pitching and am always talking, talking, talking, motivating, motivating, talking, motivating, instructing ... and I finally found the right buzzwords to get her to whip the bat through the zone and she bought into it and smacked several solid hits that made that beautiful "ping!" sound. Today's her 12th birthday so she was in a good mood as well.

Miss Feisty Pants also connected as well as she ever has and ripped the ball -- as did others -- so I hope it carries over this weekend.

Our final practice of the season is tomorrow and then it's the tournament Saturday and Sunday.

 

It's really fucking hot here today. With that ...

We won our first game of the tournament 17-9, then lost the second game 21-9 to the team that has now won 33 in a row.

We had maybe 8 minutes between games and as it got hotter and more treacherous things started to implode. First my pink-haired pitcher felt light-headed and had to leave the game. She pitched a gorgeous first inning and limited the Red Team to 1 run. In the bottom half we load the bases but only scored 1 but it's 1-1 and it feels like we might have a good shot to beat the 2-time defending champions.

But everything fell apart in top-2 when they scored 5, then my pitcher had to leave the game, then they scored 5 more in the third and 3 more in the fourth to go up 14-1. The sun zapped my girls of their energy but they hung in there, especially my lefty catcher, until she couldn't do it any longer and left after the fifth. I'm proud that we scored 5 in bottom-5 to make it 18-9 before they scored 3 in top-6 and then time ran out.

Between one of the innings I let the commish know exactly how I felt about the abortion of a schedule.

Single elimination begins in the morning.

We're 10-6. We had never won a game in the tournament before today.

 

Got the brackets for Elimination Sunday ...

We play the team that beat us in the elimination round last year -- our best game of the season. A game that gave me great hope for this season.

We opened this season with them and won 13-9. They beat us 14-9 a few weeks later. Then we hammered them 20-12 a few weeks after that.

They lost by just 2 runs to the Red Team today after losing by just 4 to the Red Team last week, so they're definitely a quality team, with 10 wins like us.

Should we beat them, we're set up well to get into the title game because we swept the teams we'd be facing in the 3rd-place game.