Friday, August 19, 2011

Baseball Wrap-Up

So, I just finished up my first season of baseball in 8 years. Overall, it went pretty well. I liked my team a lot, we got along very well. We didn't up doing very well in the end, we were pretty inconsistent, but there were definitely some positives. We've hung out since the end of the season, and the team should be pretty stable going in to next year. With a little more depth in our pitching (especially in terms of accuracy), fewer errors, and more offensive discipline we should do really well.

Personally, I thought my season when really well, especially considering the layoff that I had coming into the season. There was definitely some rust in the beginning, but I shook it off pretty quickly. At the start of the season I was hitting a lot of pitches close to the hands and getting a lot of weak grounders. It turns out the solution was pretty simple: Step back from the plate. It took until almost halfway through the season for a teammate to tell me that, but once he did, I started to hit a lot of hard line drives. In the last game of the season I hit my first (out of the park) homerun ever. Too bad it ended up not counting (stupid time limits).

Defensively, I played center field for most of the year, which is something new, I had played infield almost exclusively growing up. The results weren't too bad. I could have definitely used some more practice tracking fly balls ( I let a few over my head that I shouldn't have). In terms of throwing, my performance wasn't bad, but I had to hold back at times because of elbow pain. I'm definitely going to put some time in to throwing during the off season to build up my arm strength. I've been looking into some training programs and I'm going to incorporate some long toss. I'll get into details in a new post once I start with that, for now, I need some time off from throwing.

I'm so happy that I got to play again this year. I'm hooked. I love baseball. I've been reading constantly since the season finished. I'll get into that in a future post. For now, I'm going to try and watch some games around the city, and see if there's another league I can play in next season, in addition to Martingrove.