Today, Evan and the Marauders were in their first kid pitch tournament. For Pony league baseball, when the boys are 5 and 6, they are in tee ball. For ages 7 and 8, they do coach pitch. At age 9, they do kid pitch. The Marauders are an 8U (8 and under) team and therefore are a coach pitch team. Starting in the fall though, they will have to move up to 9U and do kid pitch. We decided to enter into a 9U tournament and do kid pitch for the first time. The tournament was at fields southeast of San Marcos which is south of Austin.
Evan and I left the house at 8:15. As is our ritual when we have early weekend games, we stopped at Donut Taco Palace and got donuts. We got to the fields a little after 9am. The first game was at 10:45. The warm ups went well.
We were the "home" team to start out so we had to pitch first. The first pitcher did pretty well. There were quite a few walks and since we hadn't worked on holding runners on, there were quite a few steals. That said, the kids played incredible for just having started working on pitching 10 days ago. In the bottom of the first, Darius led off with a single. Evan came up next. He swung and missed at a pitch that was at his eyes. Then he took two balls. He fouled off the next one before hitting a slow roller to shortstop. He beat it out and then the throw sailed past the first baseman and Evan took second. He stole third and scored on a wild pitch. The coach of the other team talked to the umpire briefly after that. We got two more runs and an out before the other coach protested. Apparently the pitching order was given to them instead of the batting order which meant we technically had batted out of order. Since the protest originally was raised after Evan, his run counted as did Darius' run but the next three batters were ruled out and the inning was over. In the bottom of the second because Evan was down in the lineup of the pitching order, Evan came up to bat again. He fouled off some more before swinging out in front of a pitch where it hit the end of his bat and rolled down the third baseline for a swinging bunt single. He scored when another batter tripled. Unfortunately, we had two many walks and ended up losing the game but our defense was great and we played really well.
We had lunch at the fields and then threw to get our arms loose and had another game at 2:15 (though it was delayed due to a passing rain storm).
This game didn't go as well. Darius led off the bottom of the first and grounded out to short. Then Evan checked his swing at the first pitch but it hit the bat and rolled right to the first baseman for the second out. We had a walk followed by a strikeout. In the top of the second, one of our boys pitched. He walked a bunch but also got two outs before he hit the pitch limit we had for him. We brought in another boy but he was really wild. I felt badly for him. That's when they called on Evan. Evan came in and got two strikes on the batter but walked him. The next batter, Evan got 0-2 with two swinging strikes. Then the batter just crushed one of his pitches, pulling it just foul. But after that Evan got him to swing and barely hit the ball. I mean it went about 5 feet. The catcher got it and tried to get the runner going home but just missed him. So Evan was back at it. He immediately got that batter down 0-2 before the batter popped up to second for the third out. So Evan threw 12 pitches, got 7 strikes and 5 balls. I was really proud of him. He did really well.
On the way home, we stopped at Yaghi's and got pizza. The boys ate well. They are now in their rooms.
Until next time...
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