Hey everyone, my name is Pierce Greenleaf. I play for the 14U All Star Baseball Academy team. I have been playing for ASBA, summer and fall, since I was 11, but we were called the Blue Claws then. I was given the chance to write about our ASBA Downingtown summer team and report about both the serious and funny events of our season.
Here is my seventh, and final, weekly report on our summer ASBA team:
As our summer season came to a close in early August, Coach Keith Falcone had some fun trying to find players because our Wood Bat League ran a week late and people on our team were on vacation. I was on vacation for a week, so this is my final report for the summer and it will serve as a way to bring everyone up to date on our last several games...
On Monday, July 26, we played the EBYA Black Team. It was a slugfest and no matter what, every ball found a hole. We lost 22-16. On Wednesday, July 28, we played the Crawdads White. We got out to an early 4-0 lead, but it went downhill from there. We walked tons of batters and made at least 1 error an inning. The final score was 16-8 Crawdads. Then, on Friday, July 30, we played the Octorara Senior Legion team, again. The game started off like every other time we played them-- we walk a bunch of people then they get one hit and it is already 5-0. They won 12-3. Our final game on Monday, August 2, we played the Crawdads Black for the fourth time. Other than our “meltdown" in the fourth inning, the score would have been 4-3 us, but it ended up being 12-4.
This season has been about trying to get all the gears meshing at the same time. Either we pitched very well or hit very well, but not in the same game.
In the EBYA league, we were somewhat outmatched, but overall we played well. We thought that when we went into tournaments we would just crush teams and it didn’t end up that way at all. For most of the season we struggled with hitting. If we hit during the span where our pitchers gave up 2 or 3 runs a game, we would have easily won half of our games.
Keith helped many of us improve on our approach at the plate, such as looking for certain pitches to hit and knowing what pitches to hit in different situations. Keith was also great in helping me, and all of our pitchers, with our off-speed stuff. It was a long summer season but a fun one as well. We improved and learned a lot from the coaching staff. I am looking forward to my ASBA Fall Season.
Thanks for following our team this summer through my weekly Blog reports!
