Softball Season Off To A Decent Start

Well, as disorganized as our softball team seems to be, we are off to a decent start. Thankfully, this year the church league was divided into lower and upper leagues. Since our summer season put us in the lower half of the standings, we will be a winning team simply due to the competition we face. Hopefully, things will be better organized soon and we will actually have some practices and set lineups. We've had one actual hitting practice and certainly need more. I'm hoping we can get two practices in before we play next week on Thursday. I'm not the coach this year, but pitching the second game of each double header.

Some of the problems this year stem from Spring starting late. We haven't had the best weather to get out and have practices. We should have started practicing a month ago on any good day we could. The season also crept up on the coaches. It has been on the website for quite some time as to how things will go this season, but I'm not sure they visit the site. We have enough players that we should have also had two complete teams entered this year. This would have allowed the players who want to compete to gather on one team and the ones that want to play for fun on the other. Last year the church paid for the season so nobody had an investment into the outcome of the games during the summer season. This year they are asking that we pay for it ourselves in addition to only playing half the games. That's a nutty idea, but most people went along with it. It's my hope that the church does kick in the money and reimburses us for this. For the fall season, that should be for the competitive players and we will be glad to pay for it since we are going to play for a trophy.

At least we are winning. I umpired the first game last Thursday as we won 16-9. I pitched the second game and recorded several strikeouts, which was great, but surprising. I went 0-4 at bat hitting only one where I wanted to, but it was caught by a very fast shortstop. All four were caught in the air. I'm sure batting practice will put me back into form as I had the highest batting average in the fall season last year. We lost that game 9-1 against a team that isn't really that good. We just weren't hitting. We won both games last night. I umpired the first game and we lost by two, 8-6. Again I pitched the second game which we won 10-6. I was 2-3 at bat since they batted me 10th. I'm not sure why you put your most consistent person who gets on base at the bottom of the lineup. Maybe it was due to the performance last week, but it still stung. Hopefully, these things will be straightened out soon and some consistency will creep in. At least we are in the easy win division and should finish in first.