Heading to Baseball

It's Friday and I am heading to baseball!

What a great thing. If the rain will hold off and the train will hurry to station and the traffic will cooperate I will be watching my son Steve play baseball for the first time this year. What a great and wonderful thing!

I was able to get to the train station to make an early enough train to be able to see him play his first game with his JV team at Princeton High School.

I'll report more later but need to close now to prepare to sprint to the car and head to the field. Happy weekend everyone!

6:45 AM - Report of the game from the following day

To continue, was first to the car, traffic cooperated, the evening was beautiful, and I made it to the Princeton Valley Road field in time to see Steve make the last defensive out of the 2nd inning. He made a play at 3rd base which he later recapped as "the ball hit my foot and kind of stuck so I picked it up and ran three steps to 3rd for the force-out." On thing I love about Steve is his ability to understate (rather than over-dramatize). Another is that he truly does understand the game of baseball and can make the right play from just about any position. Most young people get programmed in to a specific position and have trouble adapting to others.

The timing was perfect for my arrival as I got to see him bat in the bottom of the 2nd inning, and although it was a grounder back to the pitcher, it was an at bat that I got to see. Also, he was then able to spend the remainder of the inning warming up for going in to pitch the following inning.

He ended up pitching three solid innings, allowing no runs, no hits, no base-runners, nothing even out of the infield and most hit balls coming back to him for easy put-outs to first base. It was a typical outing for when Steve is throwing strong in that he had hitters off balance, swinging behind his fastball, or pounding the ball into the ground for easily fielded balls by the infielders. He also rung up 3 batters with strike outs.

The PHS JV team ended up winning the game 3-2 with the game going 6 innings and then time ran out. Steve was fortunate to be able to pitch 3 innings this early in the season but his work through February at pitching lessons enabled him to do that with ease. It helps that his pitch count is always low, yesterday he threw only about 30-35 pitches in his three innings. First pitch strike, getting ahead of the hitter, and always being around the strike zone has been Steve's hallmark from since he was 8 years old. A great example was when he got behind a hitter with a 3-1 count and battled back to get the out.

In all, a great 1st outing for Steve to chalk up a win and to build from. His coach talked to me during the game and expects that Steve will be the ace of the JV squad. That is good because I think he will get more play time and have more positive experiences with that coach and team rather than moving up to Varsity too quickly. Maybe he can earn his way up to Varsity for special games when the JV don't play. That is what happened last year between the Freshman team and JV.

Well, that is it for this report. Once again I am glad for having retired from coaching so I can be a full time fan of Steve (and Dan, too). Of course there is the little one on the way up but right now he is only 4).