We’ve played five games in eight days and won them all, including a variety of come-from-behinds. It’s an uneasy alliance, this 18U team, with three different groups, each used to playing on their own, joined. I just didn’t have the energy to fully field a baseball team, like I usually do. I have a new fulltime job in a brand new industry, and am recently separated from a marriage that had been artificially prolonged by a bloody, adrenaline-laden patent fight. Without my doing any recruiting, six kids (counting my own) came to me, wanting to play with us, one for the sixth time and another, for the fifth. I took my group of players to the guys (my friends) at the league and we were matched with our former archrival’s field coaches and their two sons. The league gave us a group of four from a local high school to fill out our roster. We’re actually doing better getting along than I would have expected, with the boys, of course, leading the way. This manager, a nice enough guy, I suppose, has a very extreme personality and seems to have some difficulty containing his emotions and dealing with difficult situations. He panics, making poorly considered and noisy, impulsive changes during play.
I also hate being 5-0. I think it means we’re not developing pitchers, and it, among other things, makes me doubt the manager’s fitness. I’d rather pitch every pitcher a couple of innings each per game, early on, and let them work through situations, to build physical as well as mental strength, so that we head into the playoffs with a strong batch of properly seasoned arms ready to rock, rather than some that are sore and worn-out and others that are under developed. I also like to keep a battery together, whenever possible, but he’s doing the opposite. He has my son catching his son and the pitchers from the other high school, and his coach’s son (the one who came with him) is catching the pitchers I brought to the team, the ones my son has been catching for years. The end result is that my son is catching more and my pitchers aren’t getting enough time on the mound.
I am philosophically opposed to fighting for the Championship Of The Early Season, because there is no such thing, and I have eliminated this guy from the playoffs when he had the higher seed, more than once. In fact, I’ve never seen him around for any of the six semi-finals in which we’ve played over the last six seasons. Now I know how that happened.
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