Sidewinder Studs!Hey Everyone....
We survived an challenging game to get a nice 12-5 win against the North County Crush today. It was a strange game....we haven't played in a couple of weeks, we have had bad weather that has limited our outside practice opportunities, and this was our first experience with leadoffs and pickoffs. As a result, our pitchers were a little flustered, we didn't hit the ball as consistently as we are capable of, and we had some runs score that generally would not.
HOWEVER, I'd say that we did well given the circumstances. We scored 12 runs on 13 hits, and left 5 runners stranded on base, so there were a few more scoring opportunities. Also, in 3 of the 4 innings, 2 of our 3 outs each inning came from strikeouts. This is uncharacteristic of our team and I don't expect this will continue. Not only are the strikeouts free outs for the bad guys, it is how we leave runners stranded on base. I just can't see that happening again. It is the largest % of strikeouts per inning we've had all season....and half of them were strikeouts where we went down watching the 3rd strike go by. All of these are things I think we will overcome as we shake off our rust.
The Great news was our defense was lights out. We had ZERO FIELDING ERRORS IN THE GAME. The first inning gave us an indicator of what was to come....Casey made a great stop at 3rd with the first batter and fired the ball across the corners as Colton made a fantastic stretch to save the out, Haiden Smith then made a circus catch in Center Field to get the second out, and Casey finished the inning off with a nice catch of a sky-high fly to finish the inning. Reese only had to throw 8 pitches and the inning was over (by comparison, the Crush pitcher had to throw 34 pitches in the first inning alone...nearly the same amount Reese threw over 3 complete innings!) We went on to have many other great plays in both the infield and outfield, with the outfield getting more action today than the infield did. If we keep making all the plays that we should make, we become a very difficult team to beat.
Coach Rob
