St. John's Baseball Intersquad Game 4

Practice was moved up from 2:00 to 12:30 today to beat the incoming rain. This meant that I had to leave extra early from making cold calls in the athletics office (how unfortunate). Even though it's frustrating not being able to play, managing the baseball team is by far my most favorite part of the day. Being involved in practices and just being around the game is satisfying enough.


But enough about me, let's talk St. John's baseball. For intersquad games, the position players are broken into two teams (Red and White), which remain the same for each game. Pitchers throw for both teams. The Red team is made up primarily of the guys who started last year and the White team is made up of freshman and guys fighting for playing time. It should come as no surprise that the White team has only won one of the four intersquad games. However, at this point of the fall, the final score is pretty irrelevant. Gaining situational experience, hitters being able to face live pitching, and pitchers being able to face live hitting, is far more important at this point of the Fall. It's been my job to keep official score of the intersquads (see picture below). Yes, I know I just said the score doesn't really matter, but keeping official score allows the coaches to track at bats and pitching performances throughout the fall.


My job during intersquads

Brendan Lobban and Sean Hagan started today's game for Red and White respectively. White drew blood first with an absolute blast over the left field wall by catcher Robert Case. Even with one of the new metal bats with reduced pop (more on these bats in another blog), Rob's home run cleared the fence by a good 15 feet. After giving up two more runs to the White team, Lobban settled down and struck out six batters over 4.0 innings. Those three runs were all White could push across as Anthony Cervone came on in relief and threw 4.0 scoreless, no-hit innings to close out the game.

The Red team's offense scored five runs off of Hagan and freshman Adam Davis. Hagan yielded only one earned run while striking out four. He rated his performance a "B+". After a solid outing in his first intersquad game, Davis struggled, surrendering the lead to the Red team in the seventh inning.

Personally, I thought the intersquad game went smoothly. There were only two mental mistakes that I noticed. While at first base, a runner was unable to see that a hard-hit groundball down the third base line was fair. Thinking it was foul, he stopped halfway between first and second. Had catcher Josh Daniel not been busting his ass down the first base line, the Red Team would have had an easy double play. The other mental mistake was a runner on second misjudging a fly ball to center field and failing to tag up. Coach Blankmeyer, on the other hand, had 15 minutes worth of mistakes to point out after practice. He did, however, give the team the weekend off (except for lifts) so clearly, something was done right today.

Thursday, October 14th's final: Red 5, White 3

Intersquad records to date: Red 2-1-1
                                         White 1-2-1




No, Coach Blankmeyer isn't pointing at me. I don't attract that kind of attention.