Practice Report

We were expecting a small group, but it was even smaller then expected. Steve and I, competitive people that we are, have been predicting who we think will arrive to practice/games first. Today we upped the ante and formally made it a pool. You predict a person and whatever place they come is how many points you get. Lowest score better. SO if you predict the first person you get 1 point. If the person your predict comes 5th you get 5 points. Anyhow, Steve took Percy and I took Everett. Everett came in a close second, behind Ethan, and Percy came 6th. Anyhow just a side note on the ways Steve and I amuse ourselves.

We started off by making Ethan run 3 laps. He had been late to the last 2 games so that would have earned him 4 laps, but we knocked off 1 for being first to practice. Everett, who owed us no laps, did it for fun. The person who this hit home the most was Percy who had to run 4 laps, once being late to a game and then for being late to practice and was not happy about it. Steve and I say good.

We started off practice by reviewing Jim's, who we were expecting to be there and was not, at-bats. We talked about how he laid down a great bunt at his first at bat and then because he had done that the infield came way in on his 3rd at bat allowing him to get the base hit. This is just one reason why bunting is so important. This segued into our first activity, what I call modified batting practice.

For this they get at least 5 swings. The first 2 are to be bunts. Setup about 5 feet from home plate are three cones. One cone is on the baseline, another cone is about 2 feet in from that and the third another 2 feet in. If on their bunt they hit it through the two cones closest to the foul line they earn 2 more regular swings. If they hit it through the outer cone they get 1 more. This activity proved to be very popular. We ended up sending everybody through it twice. The big surprise here was Ethan. He not only bunted well, being the only person to earn 2 extra swings both times through, but really hit the ball well during his regular swings. Steve later told me that Trey had been on his team last year and that Ethan was one of their better hitters. I had said at the first practice that he carried himself like an athlete, despite not having come through. This combo of information means I'm going to be looking really close at him during the next game to see what he's doing with his batting mechanics to see if something's off. It also means he's likely to be encouraged to bunt sometime on Saturday as I would actually say that next to Jim he's the most likely to get on using it.

Following this we introduced a "trick" play for the situation with runners on 1st and 3rd. If the runner on first tries to steal, the catcher, will throw it to short, who will then throw it home if the runner on 3rd goes. This segued into some preliminary work on rundowns. Our time on the field was up so we moved off the field.

Next we divided the group into 2 and Steve and I each threw fly balls to the team. I've read that this is better to do with tennis balls, hit from a racket, but neither of us have any. So we threw up balls. Afterwards we compared notes. Percy was the best on Steve's side, easily catching even difficult balls, while Fuller really struggled for me.

We then introduced footbaseball. It is basically tag football, except instead of your hands you use your gloves, which when on defense have two baseballs in them. If you tag somebody and drop the ball then they can keep running. So basically this game teaches them how to track balls (on offense) and how to make good tags without dropping the ball (on defense). The team really got into this, though it'd have worked much better with a full team there.

Overall it was a great practice. Both fun and informative. As we were leaving Ethan asked when we were going to work on pitching. He had asked at the start of practice if we were going to work on this, and I had told him no. When he asked at the end of practice I told him if he got to the game at least 20 minutes early I would work with him then. Steve and I also gave Brendan some "homework" telling him he was to have his dad practice, using a tennis ball, catching balls from the catcher's position.

Not a ton to writeup but a good solid affair.