Full Day of Baseball

Hello everyone, this is Morry.

Today, we had the first day of a tournament that is benefiting the Oak Hill fields that were destroyed in the flooding a few weeks ago.  Each boy had two games today.  The games today set up seeding for tomorrow.  Noah had games at 10:30 and 1:30.  Evan played at 4:30 and 6pm.

Noah and I left the house around 8:45 to get to the fields which were far up north.  We were playing a team from Cedar Park.  I wasn't sure how good they were going to be.  During the regular season, I am required to have each player play in the infield sometime in the first three innings.  The tournament rules do not have such a requirement.  I decided to stick with those rules for our team.  Unfortunately, the other team was really good - they were a select team and we got absolutely killed.  We started off well getting three outs on the other team, but that was pretty much the high point.  Noah hit the ball well though.  His hitting has been doing well.

From there, much of the team went to Chick-Fil-A for lunch, so we joined them.  Evan and Rachel met us there.  Noah seemed to enjoy playing with his teammates.

In the second game, we played another team from Oak Hill.  But I didn't want to wind up with the lowest seed on Sunday so I changed the lineup to play to win.  I talked to some of the parents about this ahead of time and I didn't get any push back.  The strategy worked and we scored the most runs of any team in the tee ball portion of the tournament.

We stopped by the concession stand between that game and Evan's first game.  Then we had warm ups for Evan's team.

His team also was playing against a select team and like me, Evan's coach tried to play fairly in the first game with similar results.  Evan crushed a ball in the first inning down the left field line for a double.  He singled in his second at bat.  Unfortunately a mix-up with the third base coach had Evan running to third and he was a sitting duck.  He realized this but there was a kid on second and he had to run but he slid hard.  I mean really hard.  Somehow the third baseman held onto the ball because Evan clearly was trying to knock it loose.

Evan's coach employed my strategy in the second game.  The results were not the same as mine because we played another select team.  But the game went better even if we didn't win.  My feeling has been that Evan's best position is third base.  He played first base in the first inning and made a sliding catch of a really short pop up, but then he was at third base the rest of the game.  There he caught a really high pop up in short left field, snagged a hard hit line drive, and caught a force thrown by the shortstop with the boy running hard on him and sort of running into him without sliding.  His coach described him as a "monster" at third base.  His hitting was not as good in the second game but I think he really liked being at third base.

So after getting to the fields at 9:30am, we finally left the fields around 7:20pm or so.  For Father's Day, Rachel got me a Fitbit which keeps track of your steps, active minutes, calories burned, miles walked and even your sleep.  I set personal highs in steps, calories burned and miles walked today.  I think I stood pretty much the whole day as I was the assistant coach for Evan's team.

For dinner, I stopped and picked up Torchy's Tacos.  We ate dinner when we got home and then put the boys to bed.  Both boys went to sleep fairly quickly, though Noah didn't go down right away.

Noah's team is the number three seed in just a 5 team field.  The game is at 4:30pm.  Evan is the #8 seed in a 9 team field.  He is part of a play-in game now.  He will play at 10:30am.  If he wins he plays at noon against the 1 seed.  If he wins that at 3pm and then with a win there he'd have to play at 6pm.  If Noah wins, he will play at 6pm.

Until next time...