Bad Baseball — September 23, 2024 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Long Way🎶
Cool Things👌
Oh-Fer Fall⚾

THE DAILY UPDATE

Three Things I Am Grateful For Today:

Baking.
Baseball statistics.
The variety of British accents.

Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Five. Well … that’s better than six.

Wordle 1,192 5/6

🟩⬜🟨⬜🟨
🟩🟨⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟨⬜🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: FAIL. And a bad one, at that.

Connections
Puzzle #470
🟨🟦🟨🟦
🟨🟦🟨🟨
🟨🟦🟨🟨
🟩🟦🟩🟩

The song in my head when I woke up today: Long Way, by Antje Dukevot

Sept. 22: Going Under, by Evanescence
Sept. 21: For the second day in a row, Don’t Let Me Down, by Joy Williams
Sept. 20: Don’t Let Me Down, by Joy Williams
Sept. 19: Four Stitches, by Antje Duvekot
Sept. 18: The theme song from the MEGA podcast. So that’s a new entry into my morning brain.
Sept. 17: Burn Me Once, by Bella White
Sept. 16: Follow Your Arrow, by Kacey Musgraves
Sept. 15: Burn Me Once, by Bella White
Sept. 13: It’s Not Over, by Daughtry
Sept. 12: In a radical departure from recent morning-brain songs, It’s So Easy, by Guns N’ Roses
Sept. 11: Complicated, by Avril Lavigne, who’s back in my morning brain after a one-day absence.
Sept. 10: Wide Open Spaces, by The Chicks. At least it’s not Avril Lavigne
Sept. 9: I’m With You, by Avril Lavigne
Sept. 8: When You’re Gone, by Avril Lavigne, for the second day in a row.
Sept. 7: When You’re Gone, by Avril Lavigne
Sept. 6: I Will Not Bow, by Breaking Benjamin
Sept. 5: It’s Been Awhile, by Staind
Sept. 4: So Far Away, by Staind
Sept. 3: Banana Boat, by Harry Belafonte
Sept. 2: One Love, by Bob Marley
Sept. 1: Welcome to the Black Parade, by My Chemical Romance

Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: We didn’t know who we would be/We didn’t know where we would end up/When we headed down that road

Sunday Tunes: Listened to some of the Mega podcast while baking stuff.

Something I’m looking forward to today: A day of rain and cooler weather.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Our End-of-the-Fall-Season baseball celebration, which is centered on a chili cookoff.

Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Having our baseball games rained out, which turned Sunday into a relaxing day where I actually baked stuff and watched football.

What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved two stories for a Johnny Boy Marketing client. Both subjects were speakers at a biotechnology event. Interesting people doing interesting things!

What I’ve written: Top 5 Cool Things We Don’t Appreciate Enough

The fall portion of the 2024-25 season for my 15U baseball season came to a merciful end yesterday with the rainout of Day 2 of our final tournament.

It has been an ugly season so far, and Saturday’s games were no better. We lost both games 6-5, both on walk-offs. That left us 0-8 heading into the offseason. We won’t play another competitive game as a team until May or June. That’s a long time to sit on 0-8.

It’s easy to say “We’re a better team than our record reflects,” but, truthfully, we’re not. We played like crap for much of the fall in every area of the game. We struck out too much, failed to make solid contact very often, ran the bases like drunk gerbils on more than one occasion and turned routine groundballs and flyballs into adventures worthy of Indiana Jones. In just about every statistical category we underperformed our potential and were thoroughly outclassed by competition that, to the naked eye, wasn’t all that much better than we could have been.

So what do you do to fix that? That’s the question I asked myself as the rains fell yesterday. Our poor performance wasn’t for lack of input. It was more for lack of execution. You can only throw so many batting practice pitches and hit so many practice grounders and fly balls. You can suggest, cajole, incentivize and inspire in an attempt to get your players to care about their games beyond the three hours per week we get them at practice. But the truth is twofold.

We don’t have many pure athletes on the team.
We don’t have many smart ballplayers on the team.

Maddeningly, one of our walk-off losses on Saturday came in part because of a ground ball to third with a runner on third in which everyone within a mile of the field was screaming “HOME!” as the third baseman fielded it. Instead of throwing it to the catcher to cut down the runner headed toward the plate, we threw the ball to first, got a meaningless out and let the tying run score. The game ended two batters later.

If I had a nickel for every time I have said, “Know what to do with the ball before you get it,” I’d be buying a vacation home in the mountains. Before that very play, I moved my corner infielders in and screamed, “If you get the ball, throw home.”

I know this is “just” youth baseball. No one on my team is going to sniff professional baseball as a paid player. But bad baseball irks me, and what’s most maddening about my team right now is for all those kids who say they want to play on their high school teams, who say they want to play in college, there are precious few who are putting in anywhere close to the work outside of practice to get to either place. It’s one thing to say you love the game and want to stay in it as long as possible. It’s another thing to do what it takes to back up your words. My team didn’t do that this fall, and there’s only so much a coaching staff can do.

And so the offseason plan is this: Decide who you want to be. If you want to be better than 0-8 come spring/summer, do the work. The coaching staff remains committed. But we aren’t on the field. We aren’t at the plate. We aren’t on the basepaths. If a player doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do and how to do it well at all times, we’re not going to win many ballgames going forward.

So yes, I’m frustrated. Yes, I’m kind of glad we were rained out, because I wasn’t in a good place to be positive with these boys Sunday after what I saw on Saturday.

It’s gut-check time. We’ll see who responds.

Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?

Bad Baseball — September 23, 2024

THE DAILY UPDATE

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