Fall Ball

Had a good time last night riding to the Kennesaw scheduling meeting with Chris, the whiffleball coach. He works at UPS in mergers & acquisitions. We basically have eight weeks to play games this fall. The league director suggested we schedule 12 - 14 games, but Chris and I were on the same page...the more games the better, especially with 14 players. The actual scheduling went well...just a bunch of guys gathered around scheduling games, usually on a one to one basis. The faces are starting to become familiar. Since it's be hard for both of us to schedule at the same time without duplicating dates, while Chris was negotiating with one team I'd be lining up the next person for him to talk to, feeing them out for open dates.

Chris made all eight Saturdays a home doubleheader, so we wound up with 23 games...even more than we played in the spring. (Update: The Park Director said we couldn’t play 23 games, so Chris had to cut it back to 18…just fewer doubleheaders. Bad thing is, we usually don’t make up rainouts. Maybe we can try harder to do that this fall). Only two 7 pm road games...no 8 pm games, and 19 home games. Will only has one conflict...the Saturday we're on his retreat.

My only concern is pitching...there are four Thursday games leading into Saturday doubleheaders. Will has a hard time pitching on one day's rest. We have at least eight pitchers...maybe more. On the drive home Chris and I talked about who could pitch and play what positions, and I was able to give him a lot of input. Will said they didn't hit much again last night, but that'll change tomorrow.

Will’s team scrimmaged last week (so everyone only took ten cuts instead of the 50 they all needed. Will had to play third, and was frustrated because his team had the worst players. Pretty much a life lesson for him…that life isn’t fair, it’s how he reacts to it. Playing catcher with a right-handed mitt (as opposed to my lefty glove) I dropped a couple of close plays, though I happened to make a couple of good plays…against Will’s team. So Will was mad at me…funny. I manage one season and I think I have all the answers!

My Civic MPG is down, and the only real change was new tires. Coworker Mike checked them out. They're harder tires than I'd had before, so they should wear slower and provide good traction...but that causes less MPG. On the highway I went from 40 to 37. In the city it's down from 32 to 30.