Fields of Screams: 2017 youth baseball/softball thread

The train is headed down the tracks now in Starrville: next Tuesday we're having a full-fledged scrimmage (5-inning games) doubleheader between Kacee's Kats and our own Starrville Power-Cats in 12U.

Kacee and I have hashed out most of the pertinent details and we know how we're going to run it.

Tonight we had our final practice before the scrimmage. We did have a workout set for Saturday but out of a roster of 12, I already had six confirmed absences, including assistant coach StarSis and twins Sis A and Sis B, who will be halfway across the state as StarSis-Hub makes a run at qualifying for the Boston Marathon (he's been within a couple of minutes). So I deep sixed it.

We pretty much know our lineup and our tentative batting order. Although this is very nebulous, because due to the playing time and substitution rules, our "starting lineup" and batting order will probably never be the same from game to game.

But we are going to establish a regular lineup. We won't be just shuffling everybody from position to position every inning. That stuff is done with tee-ball and coach-pitching.

Leading off in RF will be our youngest player, Sasshy, moved up from the 10U team. She'll also be our backup catcher and take some turns at second base. She's damn fast and makes contact.
Hitting second in CF will be Aly Laudanclair. She's a track star in school and lightning fast and runs down everything in the field. She also pitches (may be No. 3) and plays middle infield. But mainly she will run wild on the bases.
Hitting third and catching will be Aly Vee. She can peg it down to second on the fly, so we'll have at least an earthly chance to throw some people out there. She also plays middle infield when we want to give her a break behind the plate, and she's also probably our fourth pitcher. At bat, she just cracks it. Screaming line drives. She also knows how to bunt, but I said, "You won't be bunting more than maybe twice this season."
Hitting fourth will be Aliciana, our No. 1 starting pitcher. She's been dominating in early practice, popping the gloves of all the catchers with good control. And she's been hitting a ton, too. When we take her out as pitcher she'll probably slide over to 3B or 1B.
In the fifth slot will be Kaera. She's a solid stocky outfielder, slowER but not really slow. She rips plenty of line drives too, and should move the runners along. She'll mostly be in LF although she can handle first as well.
In the sixth slot will be first baseman Polly. Still rough and raw, strikes out sometimes, but when she connects she gives it a ride. She's big and bulky and can't leg out triples and homers, but the speed demons in front of her should all score when she tags one.
Batting seventh and starting at 3B will be Alyanna, our No. 2 pitcher. She's got as much speed as Aliciana but her control isn't quite there. As a fielder/hitter, she's decent; good power but strikes out a lot.
Batting eighth will be backup RF and 2B Lisabel. She is funny and has a good attitude, but she sometimes gets lost in the crowd. On raw physical tools, she should probably hit last, but i want to hide our 'weak links' about 2/3 of the way down in the 12-player order.
We'll send Ivy up ninth. She'll be a backup OF and once in a while take a turn at third. Ivy is big and tall and slow and hasn't played before, but occasionally she does connect.
Batting tenth is going to be Lucy, our big powerhouse C/P/LF who has missed almost 3/4 of our practices. So many, in fact, her catching duties will have to be strictly third string for the time being and she'll come off the bench as an OF too. Lucy has awesome power -- on sheer distance maybe the strongest on the team -- and she should probably be hitting up around 4th-6th. But she's missed too much practice to just stick her in the middle of the order right now. Looking ahead, both Polly and Aliciana will miss several weeks of the season on family vacations so at some point Lucy will be moving up.
Batting eleventh and twelfth, for sheer public relations reasons, will be Sis A and Sis B, the starting (and the regular) 2B/SS combination. They both are solid contact/line-drive hitters (Sis B with power too) with speed and defensive wizards, and normally they'd be fine in the 1-2-3 slots. I'm figuring dropping them down to the bottom of the order (for at least the first game or two) may defuse some parental grumping when it becomes apparent they're getting most of the innings on defense. I am going to shuffle Aly Loud, Sasshy and Aliciana into the middle infield, and they'll be fine, but I do want to have the twins in most of the time as the double play combination. Sis A can handle center when Aly Loud is out and Sis B is going to pitch an inning or so every other game.
Also, batting the twins 11-12 will in fact turn them into de facto second leadoff hitters. Second time through the lineup it will give the top of the order a big jolt to have the twins coming up before 1-2. Essentially we'll have about six lightning fast speedsters in a row.
I want to reward Sasshy for coming out and playing well as a 10-year-old on a team of 11's, so I'll keep her high up. Aly Loud is showing some boredom, too, so i want to get her and her speed up at the top of the lineup.

 

Good luck Starman!

We are playing in the championship game tonight against a team that we have battled hard against all year long. We've played them a total of 10 times and beaten them four times. It should be 5-5 but we blew the last one (as I mentioned earlier). Our semifinal game against the team with the hot-headed coaches ended up being a tough one. We fell behind 2-0, then tied it up and eventually took an 8-2 lead. But our pitcher couldn't find strike zone and a couple of base hits later it was an 8-6 game.

Thankfully, our closer came on in the last two innings and shut them down and we squeezed out a win.

Now, hopefully we can come out swinging the bat tonight, play some good defense (that has killed us in all our losses) and pitch well. I'd love nothing more than to send these 14-year-olds that are heading off to high school ball with a championship.

 

Awesome: Stagger's team is playing its championship game and our league is still a week away from starting.


Heheh, I also have the option of batting the twins 11-12 because they have become absolute baseball mavens -- they understand why I'm doing it.
Last night they were watching the MLB game on teevee and talking about the motivational factors of moving people up and down in the order.

They know if I put them up top of the order (which I could perfectly justify on performance grounds) people could get huffy about it, and it's probably better for team motivation for them to be 11-12.

Assistant Coach StarSis, aka mom, knows all this too, which helps. In fact, she went through a lot of it herself when I coached her 30 years ago.

In kids baseball/ softball on strictly strategic/ analytical terms, you're probably best off just setting your batting order 1-12 (or whatever) in strict order of hitting ability. Give the best hitters the most ABs.

But that also bunches all your "lesser" hitters at the bottom of the lineup, and creates an "abyss" situation where you can have two -- or three -- straight innings when you know you're not going to get much (or any) offense.

If you stack all your best hitters at the top, and go into the 5th inning tied, and know you have 6 hitters all in declining ability coming up in a row, things can seem pretty grim.

We have two fairly weak hitters at 8-9, but after that the quality ramps back up fast.

 

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned to the terrible twins the subject of switch hitting, just in an off-handed aside. Twin A has always been semi-ambidextrous in basketball, very strong driving to the left side. They both said they'd "think about it."
Holy smokes! Now they've learned about the platoon advantage (from watching games on teevee), and they want to do it! We actually had some extended BP last night, and totally on their own initiative, about halfway through they started hitting lefty -- and connecting (A in particular).

I still want them to get into a groove hitting their "usual" way, i.e. RH, but if they're making contact lefty, why not let em try?

However this could lead to some charges of favoritism if I let them do it and not others. (And right now, they're the only ones who can even foul it off from the left side.)

 

I started off hitting my kid last on our team. Like you, I did it for appearance purposes at first. He is probably our 5th or 6th best hitter, in terms of getting on base and putting the ball in play. Throughout most of the season, I've applied that "best hitter, second-best hitter, third-best hitter and so on" philosophy for my lineup, but then about midway through the season I noticed our batting averages were following suit, from 1 down to 12. Our leadoff hitter was at .627, our No. 12 hitter was .087 with 12 Ks. I got frustrated with our top 5 getting on base only to have the bottom half of the lineup strike out consecutively to leave the bases loaded. And then knowing the next inning was most likely going to be 3 up, 3 down.

Made a change during a weekend tournament (because that's the time to experiment, right?) and moved one of our worst hitters to leadoff and moved leadoff down to No. 4. The new leadoff wasn't a terrible hitter. He rarely strikes out, he's very patient at the plate and has good speed/base running instincts. He instantly jumped from a .100 batting average to around .280 now. He's getting on base, and setting the table for our next four hitters, which are all really good line drive/contact hitters.

Also moved my son from No. 10 up to No. 7, giving us another decent contact hitter to bridge the gap. He also has improved his batting average to around .300 and has a 6-game hitting streak. And it's become contagious, the kids behind him are all starting to hit it too. At least putting it in play, which is a huge improvement from watching third strikes. Oddly enough, our old No. 5 hitter has dipped below .200 and our old No. 6 hitter is down to .100.

It's crazy how placement in the lineup can lead to a spike or dip in batting averages/production. I think the lineup we have now is pretty solid, it's spaced out a good bit. It's still top heavy, but the bottom half is not nearly as useless as it once was. We're averaging 8-10 runs a game since that tournament and went down from probably 6-7 strikeouts a game to 2-3. That could be just a result of repetition and practice and finally seeing the ball. But I'll pay myself on the back a little and think the adjustment in the lineup had something to do with it. LOL

 

Yeah, I just hate that situation when you know you're looking at two straight shutout innings. Unless you already have a big lead, you get the idea you're just going to sink down the drain.

I'm thinking what I'll eventually do is divide the batting order into three equal "pods" of four players -- speed, contact, line-drive and power -- and then just rotate those pods randomly (assuming my full roster of 12 does show up).

Really, I have 5-6 players who conceivably could be good leadoff hitters.

 

Being able to hit from the left side, especially if they have any speed, will get them far in the sport. I covered a college team which has a coach that would turn his faster hitters around when they got to him and pretty much forced them into becoming switch hitters. Once they got that down, he taught them slapping. He was able to convert a cleanup type hitter with decent power into an All-American leadoff hitter by teaching her to hit from the left side. And she still managed to hit a dozen or so homers when she was in situations to drive the ball instead of trying to get on base.

 

We haven't played since last Thursday and won't play again till at least Monday. Sucks.

6th-graders from the town's elementary schools go on a weeklong "nature classroom" in the sticks of Upstate New York.

Popular trip every year. Many girls in the league go, which depletes teams. 4 of my girls are there.

If it's not this trip than it's chorus/band show or Big Truck Night or something something something.

The tournament is in 16 days. We've played only 7 games.

 

We had to get through that as well. We played one game with 8 players. We just had to do it. Still ended up winning (thank God the other team couldn't touch the ball). This league runs into that same problem every single year and never learns from it. Graduations, band concerts, awards banquets, class trips, they all seem to come in the last two weeks of the season and our lineup is a scrambled mess because of it.

Of course, we'll have 11 of 12 tonight for the championship. One of our kids got his Memorial Day Weekend started earlier. Had the tournament been pushed back one day, we'd probably have to forfeit the championship game, because we have three other players going out of town on Friday.

 

We also have a 13-day gap late in our season -- the league takes the whole 4th of July week off, including the weekends on both ends.

Then we play one doubleheader, then four days later the league tourney -- which could be six games in two days. So we could have 2 games in 16 days, then 6 in two.

It's nuts.

 

Well, we lost the championship game last night. It was probably one of our worst games of the season, and frankly (I can say it here because parents and/or kids aren't reading), my team quit on me. We got off to a great start, we hit a 2-run homer (our first over-the-fence homer of the season) in the top of the first inning. But in the bottom of the first, we had three errors, two walks and a single to go down 4-2. It didn't get any better in the second inning, as we gave up a single, three walks and a double to go down 6-2.

We got a little fire in the fourth inning and cut it down to 6-3 on a nice RBI double in the gap, but then promptly made two errors, walked two batters, hit a batter and gave up a 2-run double to make it a 10-3 game. We play an 8-run rule after five innings and in the bottom of the fifth they got that run on an error and back-to-back singles to end the game.

Since I can vent here, I feel like this one was on me. I let one of my assistant coaches convince me to try a defense that I wasn't real keen on using. We had two players who hadn't been at a game or practice in two weeks (class trip then graduation ceremonies for 8th grade) and I let him talk me into putting one of them at third (over my son) and the other one in left field. Third baseman made three errors, left fielder made two, including a dropped fly ball that allowed two runs to score. We had been playing fantastic defense without those guys, and the fact that they had a two-week layoff made me very leery of putting them out there to start. But I put a lot of trust into my assistant coaches, and this was one of those times when it came back to bite me. But he's coached with me before and will most likely coach with me again next year if I decide to do it, and I know he wanted to win as much as I did. Just a bad judgment on both of our parts.

As far as players quitting, that was really frustrating. We had a great season, but last night they didn't show up ready to play. While the other team was all business before the game, our kids were goofing around. I had to get on them several times to stop acting stupid. I don't mind being loose, but it's another thing when you're running around the field knocking each other's cap off your head.

The other thing is I always go into a game thinking I'm going to start A or B on the mound. I try to wait and see how each looks in bullpen. Again, I let outside forces convince me that B would be the person to start. B throws slower, a lot of junk and the last time we faced this team, he held them to 2 runs in four innings and we won. Well, B couldn't throw strikes and the strikes he did throw would have resulted in ground outs if we didn't kick it around. Because of the combination of walks and errors, he threw over 40 pitches in the first inning alone. And because of the bad start, A had one of those "should have started me" attitudes. In the second inning, I put B back out there to let him see if he could work through his issues, but he walked first batter and I put A into the game. Well, A wasn't even throwing, he was just lobbing the ball. I mean, literally lobbing the ball, not even trying to throw. His dad is one of my assistants and he got on his ass and he started throwing a little harder, but then every once in a while he'd revert back to just basically throwing BP. You could tell in his body language that he wasn't interested in being out there.

With all that said, it was a successful season from the standpoint that we made some serious improvements over the year (last game didn't show it). We lost our first two games by a combined 20-6 margin, but we figured it out and finished with a 14-8 record and second-place finish in the tournament. I truly believe the kids were relieved when it was over. I think it was a long season for them. They went from playing 10-12 games last summer as 12s to playing 22 games this summer. That's a big jump and I think a lot of them hit a wall (and it didn't help that summer is here and the beaches are looking nice).

Now we wait to see if we're going to put together an All-Star team and which of my kids will make that team. I didn't think I'd be saying this a few weeks ago, but I hope we have a few kids make it and I'm allowed to help coach. It's only been a few hours since we finished our season and already I'm starting to miss it. It feels weird to not have a practice or game scheduled for tonight.

 

Things seemed to be rolling smoothly up to the PowerCats' opening scrimmage Tuesday, but StarSis has informed me St Sissy has a school field trip, halfway across the state, scheduled for all day with return to school scheduled for 45 minutes before our first pitch. St Sissy is about a 20 minute drive from our field.

That means 4/12 of our roster will be literally changing into their uniforms as they walk out onto the field. Assuming their bus isn't delayed in traffic, for which the odds are only about 86%. And it also means they'll have spent all day hiking all over a historic museum site. So I expect a thunderously flat performance.

Now, of course, this is just a scrimmage, a joint practice, really (We talkin about PRACTICE here!), and it wouldn't kill anybody if we start the whole thing pretty "informally," start when we're good and ready, but I've actually been pretty insistent that we ought to run it like an official game (wear uniforms, start on time, bat in official batting order, etc etc). Up until now.

Oh well, IIWII.