Morning campers. Rise and shine!

We’re only days away from the start of the next intriguing instalment of the St Pats lower grade team as it gets set to embark on summer season 2024.

We have a major retooling of the lineup. Some of the old tools are still hanging around – they are just too hard to get rid of.

This is a very inexperienced lineup, but youth and enthusiasm should serve us well until the experience levels rise.

Anyway. Onward and upward. Let’s play ball.

[Hum “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” to yourself while reading!]

We started the season with 13 registered players. That sounds perfectly adequate for a winter season campaign. Unfortunately, five of the thirteen were absent for long periods due to medical conditions predominately. Only eight of the starting thirteen managed to appear in double digit numbers of games, and only two made appearances in every game. We needed lots of help to get nine players on the park every week. We did not secure any additional permanent team members.

By round 17, we had fleshed out our list of players who represented us over the course of the season to 24 (including “Shorty”). But the strain of being so restricted for core resources meant we were forced to rely every week on bodies that were already struggling to carry the load. Half games were unheard of.

Examples of this overload include
– Wade has been pitching for weeks with not much in his shoulder except commitment. (If you want to know how early in a game he is struggling with his shoulder, watch when he starts to flex his pitching hand. It was about batter five in round 17.)
– Ivan made an early return from the IL, despite declared unavailability earlier in the week of round 17.
– Mike regularly played with injuries or underlying health issues. He added to his personal list again in the final round.

Fortunately, we had body snatchers working hard each week to secure a “live one” to flesh out the roster. Many thanks to the many and varied bodies prevailed upon to play for us.

Despite this background, we competed strongly. We reached the “Lethlean Line” in eight of the fifteen rounds we played. Along the way we hit:
– 2 inside the park home runs;
– 6 triples; and
– 22 doubles.
The bulk of these extra base hits came from Wade H & Matt, who also duked it out for the batting title. But they weren’t the only ones with impressive batting averages. We had three team mates with 600 or better. And another in the 500s. It’s baseball folklore that says a career batting average of over 300 will get you to the hall of fame. 500 plus is stupendous.

Mark & Wade H carried our pitching load with almost 44 out of almost 56 innings. Other arms we hoped would be available from the start of the season weren’t able to contribute at the level we all had hoped.

Not often does anyone go a season without an error. Matt did it for us this year. He also had the second highest number of fielding opportunities.

Well done to our rookie, Steph. She didn’t miss a week and didn’t complain, not within range of my ears anyway, about not getting to play her favoured position in too many games. I hoped she enjoyed the season. It will be a pleasure to have her back with us again in future seasons.

A big thank you to Claire for her tireless efforts scoring for us. Some of our venues are anything but comfortable. Cold, wet, & windy are common features of a winter season. Claire saw her share of all of them. And always remember without a scorer there are no weekly statistics.

Thanks for stopping bye to read my thoughts – as muddy and infested with spelling and grammar challenges as they are. See you all on a baseball diamond again one day.