Yes, spring has sprung(sprang?) and once again I will be subjecting myself to pain on a weekly basis for yet another summer. I am back with the same team I was with last year in the Royal Rooters Baseball League.
We are “The Thunder”.
We were a ragged group of misfits thrown together last year as an expansion team in a league that didn’t have much room to expand, therefore we ended up with a pretty rough group of guys who lacked some skills on top of lacking some management leadership. We had a grand total of 1 team practice prior to the start of the season, and we played no warm up games for “spring training”.
We finished off last season with an abysmal record of 3-17 after losing our first 12 games to start off the season, by an average score of 15-3; Three of which were shutouts by 15 or more runs. Needless to say, we had some problems.
For the most part our problem was actually our pitching, we lacked any pitchers that could be considered a solid #1 or #2 option on the mound, and we suffered greatly because of this; Walks being the main culprit. This led to lots of runs and lots of time in the field compared to hitting, which wears everyone down and our offense suffered because of it.
A little over halfway through the year, a couple games after we actually got uniforms(although we never got hats) we had a change in the leadership of the team, along with the acquisition of some decent starting pitching. One definite ace for the team, and also one semi nutty guy who thought he was way better than he really was, but it was an improvement at least.
Our change in leadership was a combination of Alex taking over as the manager of the team, and myself picking up some of the slack with the little things like equipment and water for the games.
We managed to eek out 3 wins in our final 8 games, 2-0, 4-1, and 13-11. Somewhat of an improvement to say the least.
Now we come to winter, Alex was officially the new leader of the team as of the end of last season and he spent a great deal of time over the winter getting some new players for our team. We managed to find a new catcher, along with 5 new players who are all above average pitchers. This is combined with what has been referred to as “shedding deadwood”, which mostly consisted of players who were either terrible, never wanted to show up, showed up still drunk from the night before, or were just douchebags to their fellow teammates.
We also spent a great deal of time as a team over at the batting/fielding cages in Medford. Then we have also played a total of 5 spring training games to make sure we can work out some of the kinks.
I am disappointed that it appears as though I won’t be a starting player for the team, probably because I have been having some troubles hitting even though my fielding has been superb. It’s ok though because things do shift around during games and not everyone will make it to every game we play.
We have gone 3-1-1 in our spring training games; Yes, there are ties during spring training. This shows a remarkable level of improvement for us as a team and it lends to the thought that we aren’t just going to be a better team, we are going to be a team who is contending to win it all this year.
So look here for some updates on how our season is going, I am sure I will have plenty to talk about and either be seeking sympathy for poor play or boasting about how awesome our turn around has been.
GO THUNDER!!!