Tight games and tense moments

Posted on by David Navarre

On Tuesday, we started the day against JR’s (John Russell) team. His teams are always good teams. I was going to list ways in which they’re usually good, but it’s in almost every aspect. Only a few players are good at most things, but each player he has can boast of one above average skill. That’s true of most of the players down here. One might wonder how someone who’s around 80 can compete with players 20-30 years younger. If you hit the ball hard or throw strikes or can play catcher, you don’t have to move fast or have another skill.

Every year at our spring training, we have a day on which we do “specialties” and the professional coaches do some skill training for the players. Most years, we haven’t had a catching session because the turnout would be pretty low. This year, they had one before the morning game, run by Stan Clyburn. Since I know I’m going to be catching a lot and probably not pitching at all, I had to miss Rick Knapp’s pitching session. One of the best aspects of coming to Ponce Spring Training is that these pro coaches add so much knowledge to the team – they give great instruction and they learn our quirks over the years. It’s what they do when they’re with their minor and major league clubs, so it should be no surprise. I’ve never heard of that kind of skill work when teams go to a tournament – you just play.

In our games, we always have run limits in all the innings except the last one. This avoids destroying the arms of the pitchers. When you have at least 58 innings you need to cover with pitchers and you start the week with only 4 pitchers, having those innings end mercifully is quite important. Each of our four pitchers has to pitch every day in order to cover 14 innings.

The games on Tuesday bounced back and forth. Holding a team scoreless for an inning is probably a bigger deal here than anywhere else. 3-run innings are not rare, but scoreless ones are. The game against JR got rough in Fred Jaffke’s second inning on the mound. His control started to deteriorate and I should have gone out on the mound to give him a chance to reset. Pitching can be a finicky thing and Fred will do fine in his next outing.

Sonny Hill kept racking up the RBIs. The hitters in front of him have done a good job of getting on base and it’s paid off. Not everyone runs fast or throws strikes, but they have a talent. Sonny’s is driving runs in.

We managed to squeeze out the morning win with some shutdown innings from Glenn Strachan. It’s been a delight catching for Glenn as his location is very good and the velocity exceeds the rest of the pitching staff. Sometimes, we get the pitch we watn, where we want it and they still hit it, but more often than not, we’re getting weak contact or swings and misses. Those misses are increasing as the week goes on.

Jerry Spitz started the second game and we weren’t great in the field behind him. The estimates of the number of outs we gave them with errors in the first innings were around 7-8 outs. That makes it hard to win. Jerry did get into an argument with the umpire when an opposing player stepped into the plate to avoid a curveball that hit him… over the plate. Jerry turned in 3 innings with the lead passing back and forth between the teams, with one or the other being one run up.

A late add to our team was Rick Kramer. He’s a little speedster and used to be a “vacuum cleaner” in the outfield. There might be a step lost that prevents him from getting to all the balls he used to, but he does well. His bat speed is exceptional and he’s been scooting around the bases for us, scoring critical runs. When the second game went into extra innings and Rick started the inning on second base, I knew we had that run.

In the extra innings, Glenn felt that his hand was doing well enough (recovering from a line drive off it last week) that he took his turn at bat. Mitch Orcutt was pitching the late innings and kept right on going in extra innings. Mitch sometimes comes inside and, sure enough, he hit Glenn on the first pitch. I went up next and got hit on the hand on the second or third pitch. It’s the hazard of pitching inside and, for me, the hazard of crowding the plate. As a result, we took the lead.

On a bloop that landed at the edge of the grass and bounced to Bill Murray, the opposing team’s runner on 2nd tried to score. Bill made a nice throw, which I caught a few feet up the line to beat the runner by a large margin. Those extra innings are a jumble in my head of what happened when and how.

With the heart of their lineup coming up in the bottom of the 9th, Glenn shut them down and I caught strike three to end the game. Hard-fought and nicely won.

So you want to be a catcher?

Posted on by David Navarre

“All right, so who are my catchers? Joe, I know I’ve got you.”

Silence. No one raises their hand, despite two others having been assigned to the team with the thought that they are catchers.

“I’d like to catch a little.”

So, at the end of the first day, I’ve caught nearly as many innings in one game as I caught last year. I think I caught nine innings last year – never more than three in a day. Today, I caught 8 innings. The last four in both games. It was awesome.

So, I’m down at Ponce de Leon Spring Training, playing at historic Terry Park Sports Complex down here in Fort Myers. At the end of January every year, the Ponce de Leon league from the Washington DC area hosts a balanced tournament and training week. Six professional coaches to coach the 6 teams (including Darrin Garner, who is taking a week away from pre-training with the Arizona Diamondbacks to coach my team). Steve Liddle (former bench coach with the Twins and Tigers) runs the camp for us. They divide all the players into relatively equal teams (with provisions for who wants to play together) and we play 8 games over 5 days (2 Monday, Tuesday and Thursday). There are trainers in the clubhouse to handle preventative care and injuries. Everyone gets a locker and can have the clubbie do their laundry. It’s a far different experience from Roy Hobbs or other tournaments, and also far different from fantasy camps. It’s all about playing baseball – learning a little and playing even games – rather than focusing on retired ballplayers or only on winning.

I thought I was coming in here to be a utility player – catch a few, pitch a few and play everywhere in the field. When it was revealed that two of the guys that the league thinks are catchers only did so because their teams needed it, I was both scared and excited. I’d been doing a hundred or more weighted while walking my dog every morning and trying to find a moment to do additional reps (without weight) all day to get over 200 squats. That preparation has paid off.

I picked up a Catcher’s Notebook from Always Grind to use and evaluate whether I can have my youth catchers use them when I coach. So, once I settled with Joe Bauer that we’d split the innings, I went to each of our 4 pitchers and took notes on their pitching repertoire and preferences. I had thought I’d try something like this when I was going to catch in a tournament for a team last fall (canceled by the hurricane down here) but having the structure of the notebook is much better. I’m still a newby here and wouldn’t have guessed what to be thinking. After a day, I’m pretty sure that it will also be a good thing for 12-year-olds to do. They may not have a grasp of all the nuances, but it gets them thinking critically about how the game went, how they performed well and what they need to work on.

The first game of the day was a little brutal. We ended up giving up 3 runs in four different innings (3 run limit in all but the final inning) but I got to work with three of our four pitchers. Glenn Strachan is a tournament pitcher that was allocated to our roster to give us an ace. He locates his pitches extremely well and gets the hitters to hit it where we want it. Being that we’re all old men, that sometimes still doesn’t result in an out. Bill Murray (no, not that one!) came in and pitched a couple of innings and some of his pitches are honestly unhittable. That should work out well this week as long as he’s around the strike zone. Fellow Michigan State alum and Washington Nationals grounds crew member, Fred Jaffke, finished the game out. With a final score in the morning game of 12-4, we were hanging our heads a little.

In the second game, Jerry Spitz started the game with Joe behind the plate. After 3 innings, Glenn and I cam in as a battery. We all managed to keep the game close and when we held them scoreless in the top of the 7th (we’re playing 7 inning games), we eked out a 1-run victory to set us even at 1-1. There was far more timely hitting in this game and, in particular, Sonny Hill banged a hard line drive up the middle that brought in 3 runs while the centerfielder chased it down

I had a reasonably good day at the plate, going 1 for 2 in the first game with one of the 4 RBIs and 1 for 3 in the second game with one RBI. Behind the dish, my blocking was very good and my receiving was good enough. I did have two runners steal – one when I bobbled the pitch and another when my throw was a little off-line. The hard throws in the warmup when “coming down” should help deter much thievery. I did field a few balls near home that resulted in outs and ran down a runner who tried to steal home on a walk. I’m very happy with how I played behind the dish.

We feel like we escaped by getting a split on Monday, and will come back hard on Tuesday to make our drive for the championship.

Opening day jitters

Posted on by David Navarre

I was nervous. After all, it was opening day. I’d had rookie jitters through half of my first season, so I expected to be a little nervous before this game. It was probably fortunate that I didn’t start, so I could get into the rhythm of the game and put those jitters aside. When I strode to the plate with two outs and two men on, I was carrying my brand-new Phoenix bat. Standing in the box, I made a conscious decision to simply watch the first pitch. There were no jitters. I’d seen 85 mile-an-hour fastballs over the winter in the batting cage near my house. The pitcher’s grey hairs and steady pace gave me confidence. On his second pitch, my timing was all 85 mph and I ended up in my follow through before it crossed the plate, even with an attempt to slow my swing. 0 and 2 isn’t always the easiest count to hit in. I steeled myself and watching the release of the ball with great anticipation….

When I strode to the plate for the first time in Ponce de Leon baseball last year, I’d had 34 years between singles. Way back in 8th grade, I’d been inserted late in a game we were losing badly, and beat out a groundball, then, foolishly, tried to advance on the overthrow. I wasn’t that fast then, so I was out and felt like an idiot. 25 years of men’s league softball and countless seasons of coed beer league ball later, I punched a ball off the glove of a first baseman who couldn’t find the handle to it for the putout. Standing on first base, playing on a high school baseball field for the first time, I was ecstatic.

Through half of the season, though, when standing at the plate, I would literally be shaking in my boots. I worried that if I didn’t play well, I’d lose my spot on the team. My wife kept reassuring me that I was better than guys who seemed to average 15 years older than me. I knew I was faster, so every time that I got on first base, I was looking to steal second. That worked, helping my confidence. I even stole third once. Heck, I stole second in a playoff game, diving head first and arm’s length into right field to avoid the tag (the throw beat me, but the stretch was simply too far for him.) By those playoff games, I was no longer shaking at bat, but still worried about earning my keep.

In the fall, our team doesn’t play in the league, but instead uses our field to play more relaxed pick-up games with invitations extending to sons, friends of sons, and men not yet old enough for our league. So, the pitching is a bit faster, though without much movement (at the request of the team manager, since it’s supposed to be live batting practice.) While last year’s regular season was a struggle for me at bat, relying on walks to get on base early in the season before starting to hit a bit, the fall was a break out. 2 or 3 hits every game and time to shine in the outfield. It also allowed me to bring Andrew Cline up from the Humble Flies as a rookie to follow me onto the team.

In the off-season, I bought myself a new bat. My original Louisville Slugger was nice, but I wanted something more. When we went to Cooperstown in August (on our way to Saratoga for horse racing), I went into a few stores selling bats. All had strict prohibitions on swinging the bat. So, I picked up bats, considered how they felt and passed. If I couldn’t swing it, I didn’t want to buy it.

In the winter months, the anticipation was too much. One day, I saw an ad for Phoenix Bats, and decided to follow it to see what they had. I always thought that the only variables in bats were the length and the weight. I was quite wrong. I’ll go into detail on this in a future post, but suffice it to say that I was quite pleased with the variety of offerings. I ordered my bat and it arrived well in advance of Opening Day.

Our team prefers to use wood bats, but not every team wants to, and the league doesn’t force anyone to. Since our opening day opponents chose not to limit themselves to wood bats, we were free to use whatever we wanted. Nonetheless, I’ve found I hit better with wood, so I took my brand new Phoenix Bat to the plate.

That pitch came in and my internal clock was not quite running at 85 miles an hour, but it was running fast, so I swung a little early hitting it on the end of the bat and driving it down the left field line. There were runners on, so rounding first base, I knew I was headed back. I jumped on the base and proudly shouted,  “Wood bat!”

After another hit, I was dancing off second, taking a big lead in expectation of scoring on any hit. As I headed to third on a shallow hit in the outfield, Bill waved me home. I didn’t think it was drawing a throw, but I was hustling anyway. I was surprised when the catcher stepped on the plate, but I crossed a few steps before the ball arrived. So, with a few hits strung together with two outs, we tallied three runs.

My totals for the day: 2 for 3, with a stolen base and a run.

Final score: 11-2 victory

Season stats: .667 batting average, 1.333 OPS, 1 SB, 1 R