Failure to Launch

We never even got off the ground Saturday night in our playoff game.  Six runs in the second inning did us in before we got started.  We managed a run late but it was not nearly enough.  Cooper wins the tournament 8-1.

The pitching strategy was to save the best pitcher and see how many innings we could get through before having to go to him.  It was too many, as that six run second inning exploded in our faces.  Our dobbers were in the dirt after that and we never recovered.

Two different days we tried to “get by” instead of going for the throat.  The new pitch count rule will do that to you sometimes.  We had our chance to go for the throat Wednesday when it was do or die for them and to be honest the pitching was good enough.  The real culprit was hitting.  The last two games, we just did not get enough.  When your hitting is questionable, you must get your guys that are hitting up the max number of times.

Defensively we played cautiously and gave up easy bases to their runners too frequently.  We cannot do that.  We don’t consistently play against excellent pitching all year.  Cooper interleagued with Lubbock and did see this good pitching consistently all year.  We cannot expect our kids to suddenly turn the switch on in two weeks against this pitching they only see a few times a year. 

With our bats therefore somewhat questionable, we have to do all the little things right defensively, and we didn’t.  Twelve errors in three games.  No team is going to win many games with numbers like that.

Enough of the negatives, though.  This is a good group of kids with talent and positive attitudes.  They have a future in their division of baseball.  Playing against these much larger communities will help in the long run.

Another year of Little League in the books.  Have a great summer….