Game: Marlins vs. A's

Well. What a day. Steve and I start off the day emailing each other our confidence against the A's. At around 9:45 I get a call saying that Jodi will not be there due to 103 degree fever. This adds to the fact that the previous night I learned that Brendan had a doctor's appointment for a battery of exams that was set months in advance and thus would be missing the game. Both understandable.

Then at about 4, I get a call from Kelvin telling me he TOO has a 103 degree fever. Just as I am about to finish my conversation with Kelvin, I Avi on call waiting. I hang up with Kelvin to talk to Avi. He then tells me he won't be at the game. When I ask him why it is because he got in trouble again. I ask to speak to his mom. I then explain if Avi isn't there we'd have 8 players due to illness. She tells me she's going to call me back. 35 minutes later she calls me back and tells me that she will punish him some other way and he'll be at the game. But he's going to be a half hour late. Ok. Fine. We can play with 8 players for a half hour.

I get to the field about 5:25, as I had been working at the youth center right next door to the fields and that was the earliest I could get away. When I get there all that is there is Jesse. Everett and Trey arrive shortly thereafter. In the end 5:40 rolls around and we have all our expected players except Fuller. Only the thing it is 5 minutes before the game is to start we also don't have any equipment, the box is locked, nor do we have an ump.

We call the team over anyway for our pregame talk. Steve later tells me that he could tell from the way they came over that he knew it was going to be a bad day. We simply didn't have energy. I think the best possible explanation is that we were missing so many people that they felt defeated. Anyhow, we still have no equipment, though we now have an ump.

I then start to make phone calls. I make so many phone calls Bobby, later asks me if I work for the Park District too (I work for the Youth Center and Library) but no I don't. I literally call 4 different people, none of whom answer, and leave messages for all. During this time the other coaches came over and, after discovering that I was not the field supervisor, but instead a coach, (you'd have thought the bright Marlins uniform was a give away there) tells me that they also are also locked out at their field. One of the dads on the other team has the idea of going to the THIRD field to see if by some chance that equipment box is open. It is. As he's going off I get hold of one of the park district people and he tells me he's sending someone over as soon as he can. I thank him. The dad comes back with a bag, having dropped the other bag off at the other field. So we'll have to share, but it's better then not having anything. Now at this point it's 6:00 and we still have no Fuller or Avi. While all the hubub was going on about equipment, Jesse's little brother, Jonah, and Jesse's father had offered to have Jonah play. Jonah plays 4th grade travel. I thank him and tell him I want to sort out the equipment first, still thinking Fuller was going to show. Anyhow when it looks like Fuller isn't going to show I ask the other team if we can "call up" this player as we only have 7 and are expecting 1 late. He agrees, as is reasonable. He also agrees to let us have an outfielder if we need one. I thank him and tell him I hope we won't need to do that. Jonah goes home to change.

So we go to bat in the first inning and score 2 runs. I'm thinking that perhaps things will be OK. We send Everett up to the mound as our starter. And they hit him. The good news is that they hit one to the borrowed outfielder and he catches the ball. He lobs it back in, letting a run score, but Steve and I agree
A. We're thankful he caught the ball, as many of our kids would've dropped it
B. It's better then having no one there.

A batter later Avi arrives and he gets sent out to the outfield.

Everett and I had talked about pitching rather then throwing before the game, but I think he tried to do too much and didn't look as sharp. I am doing this writeup without the scorebook next to me, so I don't have all the details, but he ends up letting up 3 runs.

And basically the game goes downhill from there. They keep scoring and we don't. We don't get any energy until the 4th inning when Trey makes a good play at short. We are down 5 going into the 5th and approaching the time limit. We try and rally, but can't get a run and the game is over. Quick comments on each of our players:

Percy -- Did not pitch well in the 4th. I went out to talk to him after his 3rd walk. There were runners on 1st and 3rd. I basically told him to forget the runners and just focus on the batter. And he did. His pitching improved then and he got 2 outs in only 3 batters which was fine. More work will be needed here, but he COULD be our 2nd or 3rd best pitcher if he can put it all together.

Jesse - Got the game ball for going 2 for 3. Though the out was on a ball that was way too high and he hit, which is becoming a pattern. He got very frustrated with himself after that one. This is not the first time he's gotten frustrated, though Steve and I are getting better at being able to get him to calm down when he does.

Brendan - Caught the only fly ball on the team. The big news is that he tried to coach Avi when Avi was pitching. That didn't work too well. Steve and I will be talking to him today about not coaching the pitchers. Or other players for that matter as there has been some of that.

Avi -- We pitched him two innings. First inning went well. He struggled during the start of the second inning. After he walked his second batter I went out to talk to him as I thought we could still win it at that point. He explained that he was getting mixed messages from his players. I told him to ignore his players and listen to me: throw strikes. He did and got the last 2 outs with only about 5 pitches. Now the thing is I think he can pitch 2 innings. Which we need. However, if he's going to regularly get grounded during games, which it also seems like, then we can't really schedule him to pitch. When we do the lineups we always do Pitchers first and then Catchers and everything else falls into place around that. If he's going to bow out on us at the last minute it really messes us up. So I think Avi will be seeing more chances a relief pitcher until we see that we can count on him showing up.

Ethan - Unremarkable this game. Struck out each time at bat. Focused better then usual in the infield I feel.

Jim - He's very excited about bunting. We had runners on 1st and 2nd and asked if he could lay down a sacrifice. I said sure. So he laid down a perfect bunt... for a hit. The runner then got out at 3rd. It's funny that when he tried to bunt for a hit he did a sacrifice and then did the opposite yesterday. What was great though was that his bunt then setup a play in the 5th where they came way in on him and he then hit a line drive, which if they had been playing normal depth would have been an out, but turned into an easy hit. However, he then got called out stealing when he was really safe and he exploded. This is not the first time he's gone of the hook but it was the worse. He even refused to shake the other team's hands. Steve and I did a mixture of the calm down/you made a bad choice speech after the game and he seemed to get it and Dad thanked us. We will NOT have a kid displaying bad sportsmanship.

Trey - His hitting slump continues. He fielded well today. He also caught pretty well. I'm sure he'll snap out of slump soon.

Everett - He did a pretty nice job of catching. I already discussed his pitching. He really made a bonehead decision on the base paths getting caught way off the bag after a pitch killing a rally we had in the 3rd.

Jonah - We was a ball magnet. The rule is when you call a kid up from the lower league they can only play the outfield and have to bat last. Which in our case was unfortunate since he ended up in the heart of our order. Anyhow the first time a ball was hit to him he was completely unprepared and the ball got by him. The next two were fly balls which he dropped but then managed to throw in and get somebody out. I talked to him later and he told me he had a good time and would want to play for us again. Which is good because normally you have to go through the league supervisor 2 days in advance, so she can find somebody, but with him we can call him up on very short notice with no problem.