BATTING STATS
























AVG AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI TB BB SO OBP SLG
TEAM .358 341 102 122 22 1 0 98 146
74 57 .466 .428















Fairchild .545 22 7 12 5 1 0 13 19
4 2 .615 .864
Smith .464 28 13 13 3 0 0 12 16
9 5 .579 .571
Becker .444 18 5 8 1 0 0 8 9
2 5 .500 .500
Hinthorne .440 25 12 11 2 0 0 7 13
5 2 .533 .520
Burcham .417 36 12 15 3 0 0 16 18
6 2 .488 .500
Peleti .407 27 9 11 1 0 0 5 12
9 2 .556 .444
Reeves .389 36 11 14 2 0 0 10 16
8 5 .500 .444
Duffy .308 26 2 8 0 0 0 6 8
2 8 .357 .308
Hogger .273 22 6 6 3 0 0 3 9
9 5 .469 .409
Madche .273 22 5 6 0 0 0 3 6
4 3 .370 .273
Heller .273 11 3 3 0 0 0 2 3
1 1 .333 .273
Salle .231 26 5 6 0 0 0 5 6
3 5 .300 .231
Mitchell .227 22 8 5 0 0 0 3 5
5 6 .357 .227
Clements .226 31 7 7 2 0 0 7 9
8 7 .385 .290
















PITCHING STATS























ERA IP AB H R ER HBP BB SO WHIP AVG

TEAM 4.25 84.7 338 82 69 40 0 55 63
1.62 .243
















Smith - 1.7 6 2 0 0 0 0 1
1.20 .333

Clements 1.29 7.0 23 2 1 1 0 3 6
0.71 .087

Burcham 2.79 9.7 28 7 8 3 0 5 0
1.24 .250

Reeves 3.00 6.0 29 9 12 2 0 6 3
2.50 .310

Fairchild 3.50 18.0 76 19 9 7 0 4 18
1.28 .250

Salle 3.60 15.0 53 10 6 6 0 14 14
1.60 .189

Madche 3.64 17.3 75 20 17 7 0 8 9
1.62 .267

Peleti 7.11 6.3 28 6 7 5 0 7 8
2.05 .214

Duffy 22.13 3.7 20 7 9 9 0 8 4
4.10 .350

Thursday, November 4, 2010

My Hero


Our fearless leader pitched last night for the Escogido Lions. He pitched three innings, gave up three hits, one earned run and struck out two. Jamie has gone to the Dominican Republic to play winter ball. How is THAT for dedication and the pursuit of a dream!

Monday, October 25, 2010

Sort of a Schedule

I hope to finalize the REAL schedule by the end of the week. Sorry, but I have some balls in the air that are making it unrealistic to assign real times as yet, but they should clear up soon.

For now here is a loose guideline of the potential for work out dates through the winter.

We have rented RIPS, down by the airport in Burien for the following Sundays from noon to 4:00. Our team will have rotating 2 hour blocks in this schedule and will perhaps have a weekend off in each month. We will go from noon to 2:00 or 2:00 to 4:00 the following weeks.

Nov: 7, 14, 21

January: 9,16,23,30

February 6,13,20,27

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Sorry for My Poor Communication of Late

Sorry for the late notice of no practice this weekend.  I really should have got this word out sooner so you could have all made plans for an open weekend.

My lame excuse is that I am a CPA.  Although I no longer work for a CPA firm and am just an in-house guy for one company, my day job was CRAZY this week.  We had to wrap up our 401K audit and finalize the form 55oo and have them completed by Friday, Oct 15.  That and I still do the returns for myself and about three deadbeat friends ALL of whom wait until the last minute and give me a shoe box full of receipts and expect me to work a miracle and get them a refund.  My wife is self employed and her idea of getting me her tax information is that she has until 8:00 pm on the 15th, since I have until midnight to file.  And I am even powerless to snoop and just take it over as her business and all her information is in French and as you all have come to realize by now; I struggle with English!

That said, I love her dearly and worship the ground she walks on, but grrrr her sense of time and her bookkeeping skills cause me internal strife.

As we begin our winter workout - with an official real dependable schedule that will only be changed when you least expect it - you will note that we will go once a week hitting at RIPS (which is out in Burien) for two hour blocks of time.  Our times will vary between Noon to 2:00 and 2:00 to 4:oo.  Most likely our time will coincide with Seahawk games which will be either good or bad news (it is too early in their season to know just yet).  And we will go three weeks on with one week off on a four week rotation.  I thought it would be nice to have a weekend off every so often.  

Again this will start 11/7, we will shut down the week of Thanksgiving and start up again the second week of January.  We will repeat this three weeks on one week off until March and then we brace ourselves for Seattle weather and start practicing on a diamond a couple of times a week.

We will be having a mandatory parent meeting on November 7.  Jamie and Karen will be in town.  They would like to meet you all, discuss expectations of parents and players and do an  overall welcome to MBC.  The time of this meeting and its location will be know soon.

Monday, October 11, 2010


God bless google. I read many poems as a young man. I loved to read, and surprisingly I loved to read a good poem. But like the people in my life, I am not too good with names. I read things, get into discussions about them and am at a loss when one asks me who the author is. And now, as an older man, a man in such awe of those who write so well, for those who capture life in words so well, I am embarrassed that I typically do not know the author.


But google has changed that for me. Now I remember just tiny pieces of what I read many years ago, type the phrase into google and I get the author, complete works, and I even get things they wrote that I neglected to read at my younger age. As a young man my reading was undisciplined, haphazard in both what I randomly got my hands on, or what some wonderful English teacher put into my hands; thank you Miss Pesnell (of Memphis), Mr. McCamey (misspelled I am sure of Seattle) and Mr. McFarlane (of Seattle; and who in order to suck up to Peggy not too long ago pretended that SHE was his favorite student and not me).


But I have now discovered that Carl Sandburg wrote many of my favorite poems, and here is a good one.


Thank you Carl Sandburg!


A Father To His Son

A father sees his son nearing manhood.
What shall he tell that son?'

Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.'
And this might stand him for the storms
and serve him for humdrum monotony
and guide him among sudden betrayals
and tighten him for slack moments.

'Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.'
And this too might serve him.
Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.
The growth of a frail flower in a path up
has sometimes shattered and split a rock.

A tough will counts. So does desire.
So does a rich soft wanting.
Without rich wanting nothing arrives.

Tell him too much money has killed men
and left them dead years before burial:
the quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs
has twisted good enough men
sometimes into dry thwarted worms.

Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.
Tell him to be a fool every so often
and to have no shame over having been a fool
yet learning something out of every folly
hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies
thus arriving at intimate understanding
of a world numbering many fools.

Tell him to be alone often and get at himself
and above all tell himself no lies about himself
whatever the white lies and protective fronts
he may use against other people.

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.

Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.

Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is born natural.
Then he may understand Shakespeare
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
Michael Faraday and free imaginations
Bringing changes into a world resenting change.

He will be lonely enough
to have time for the work
he knows as his own.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

RAINOUT

Due to considerable conflicts for attendance, the forecast of rain, the actual rain falling at the time of this message and the BIG LARGE LETTERS on top of the current calendar (i.e. OCTOBER) I am cancelling the practice for Saturday Morning at 10:00AM

Please email that you have the word, I will start calling people at 9:00 AM tomorrow if I haven't heard from you.

And I am not real good at this, but it sure would be nice if some activist among us developed a phone tree system for situations just like this!

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Mark Fidrych a/k/a The Bird




I was searching for baseball poems on the Internet. Nothing could be more poetic than a poem about Mark Fidrych. He was special. He played the game with heart, took the nation by storm and never once winced or complained when his story ended in tragedy.

He never made big money, a great rookie season playing for the MLB minimum and then he was done. Went back to Massachusetts drove truck and farmed and died tragically a few years ago when a truck he was working on fell on him.

Need I tell you that the Bird was close to my age, close to my heart and a hero of mine for all the right reasons.


Mark Fidrych, Baseball’s Beloved ‘Bird,’ Dies at 54
Published: April 13, 2009

DETROIT — Mark Fidrych, the golden-haired, eccentric pitcher known as the Bird, who became a rookie phenomenon for the Detroit Tigers in 1976 and later saw his career cut short by injury, died Monday. He was 54.


His death occurred on his farm in Northborough, Mass., Joseph D. Early Jr., the district attorney for Worcester County, said in a statement. A family friend discovered Fidrych’s body beneath a Mack dump truck, Early said. He appeared to have been working on the truck at the time. The Massachusetts State Police began an investigation into the accident, he said.


During the summer of the nation’s bicentennial, Fidrych (pronounced FID-rich), then 21, electrified the baseball world. “He was the most charismatic player we had during my time with the Tigers,” said Ernie Harwell, the veteran announcer, who began broadcasting Tigers games in 1960. “I didn’t see anybody else who was as much of a character as he was."


Fidrych’s record in 1976 was 19-9, with an earned run average of 2.34, the best in major league baseball, and 97 strikeouts. His 24 complete games were the year’s best in the American League. Fidrych was named the rookie of the year in the American League and finished second to Jim Palmer in the race for the Cy Young Award.


Called “the fidgety, 6-foot-3 bundle of nerves” by The New York Times, Fidrych had a mop of golden curls and a gawky gait that prompted a minor league manager, Jeff Hogan, to compare him to Big Bird, the “Sesame Street” character. The nickname — shortened to the Bird — stuck, but his appearance was only one of Fidrych’s vivid traits.


He often talked to the baseball, fidgeted on the mound and got down on his knees to scratch at the dirt. Fidrych would swagger around the grass after every out and was finicky about baseballs, refusing to reuse one if an opposing player got a hit, and rejecting fresh ones he declared to have dents. He liked to jump over the white infield lines on his way to the mound, with a wide, toothy grin that, coupled with his hair, made him easy to spot even from the upper reaches of Tiger Stadium.


“Everybody really had a fondness for this young guy, especially the young girls,” Harwell said. “After he got a haircut, they’d run into the barbershop to see if they could get the curls off the floor."


Mark Steven Fidrych was born Aug. 15, 1954, in Worcester, Mass. His wife, Ann, whom he married in 1986, and a daughter, Jessica, survive him. The son of an assistant school principal, Fidrych attended public and private schools in Worcester and entered the 1974 amateur draft.


But Fidrych, a right-hander, was not picked until the 10th round, and he spent two seasons in the minor leagues before making the Tigers after spring training in 1976.He threw a few innings as a relief pitcher and made his first start in May. He captured the attention of Tigers fans in his first game as a starter by throwing seven no-hit innings and allowing only two hits in a 2-1 victory against the Cleveland Indians.


A month later, Fidrych pitched the Tigers to a 5-1 victory over the Yankees in a nationally televised game in front of a capacity crowd at Tiger Stadium. Fans, who rocked the stadium with applause, refused to leave until Fidrych came out from the dugout to tip his cap. Weeks later, he was named the starting pitcher in the 1976 All-Star Game. But he gave up two runs and took the loss as the National League won, 7-1.


Still, Fidrych’s reputation grew as the season progressed, drawing near-capacity crowds to stadiums across the country as he performed his antics and kept winning ballgames, falling one short of 20 victories.The Tigers, who paid him the league minimum, $16,500, for the 1976 season, gave him a $25,000 bonus and signed him to a three-year contract worth $255,000.


Picking up a series of lucrative endorsements, including a deal with Aqua-Velva, an aftershave maker (he joked to The Detroit Free Press that “it was a lotion, not an aftershave, because I really wasn’t shaving yet”), Fidrych wrote an autobiography with the author Tom Clark called “No Big Deal.”


But as it turned out, his rookie season was his biggest.Fidrych sustained two serious injuries as soon as the 1977 season began, tearing the cartilage in a knee while cavorting on the field in spring training, then suffering a rotator cuff injury during an early-season game. “I was playing Baltimore in Baltimore, and about the fifth inning, something happened,” Fidrych wrote. “The arm just went dead."Fidrych did not have surgery until 1985, but by then his career was long finished. After 1976, he played in only 27 games through 1980. Released by the Tigers in 1981, Fidrych competed briefly with a minor league team owned by the Boston Red Sox.His lifetime major league record was 29-19, with a lifetime E.R.A. of 3.10, in 58 games, all but two of them starts.


Fidrych went home to central Massachusetts, where he bought a dump truck, becoming a licensed commercial truck driver, and eventually his farm in Northborough, where his family owned a diner.Fidrych returned to Tiger Stadium in 1999 for ceremonies marking the last game there. A cheer went up from the crowd when Fidrych pawed at the dirt on the mound.


“He was a little naïve, just a sweet kid, really,” Harwell said. “He captured the public’s
imagination.”



And now, the poem that brings it all back. How interesting that it is told via a man with a routine job, a man who could have made this routine job a career, but a man who is striving for more.



I Once Was Mark The Bird Fidrych's Substitute Mailman
David Schaafsma


I know Northboro pretty well
You go door to door every day
You get to know a town well, maybe too well
But for years I was a substitute carrier
On Keigo’s route, the name Mark Fidrych, The Bird
On one of four hundred mailboxes


‘74 pumping gas at the Sunoco
Algonquin diploma in hand
Spring training ‘76―a Tiger
If they want me to be a bat boy,
I’ll do it
Coleman gets the flu,
Bird gets his shot
Retires the first fourteen Indians, two hitter


That summer Ford pardons Nixon
Bird starts the All Star game
The summer of disco,
Mark borrowing Tommy Veryzer’s i.d. to dance The Fried Egg


You remember what he was like:
When I’m out there the mound belongs to me
Talk to the ball, point where it has to go
Throw back balls that have hits in them
Manicure the mound on hands and knees
Strut around the mound after every out, run on
And off the field every inning


Manager Ralph Houk said, I’ve never seen anything like it
Not even Walter Johnson started this fast
This is how it fell apart, and it always does
But not usually this sudden


Goofing around in center field, spring training ’77
Blows his knee out, cartilage torn
In July, his arm, it just feels dead,
Torn rotator and it’s over
Nineteen wins one season, eight wins the next four years
And just like that he’s done, he’s toast


Summer ‘74 pumping gas and in ‘82
Back pumping gas, glass slipper
No longer fits


A contractor in Northboro today
53, just like me
I like to drive truck, he said when he played
So that’s what he does, commercial trucker
Ten wheeler, hauling gravel and asphalt


Some people say I look like him
Same height, same age, same curly mop of hair in those days
Road trip that summer to see him at Tiger Stadium
Couple kids ask me for his autograph
My buddies have a good laugh as I sign their gloves


I left the P.O. and Northboro in ‘97
Keigo retired and I had the chance to take his route
I would have become Mark Fidrych’s mailman!
But to take any job for ten years
Makes it your career
I had bigger plans for my life


I ran into him just once:
Crazy blizzard winter of ‘95
Three feet of snow,
see a guy digging out mail boxes
As I come with the mail the guy says
I’ll have this dug out in a couple minutes, sir
And I see it was the Bird
Sir, he calls me, a guy who once pitched The All Star Game!


No problem, I appreciate it, I say, and I did
Standing there, with an armful Of Rolling Stones and electric bills

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Thursday, September 16, 2010

CHANGE TO THIS WEEKEND


This Sunday we will work at Frank Papasedero field. I am really excited. Two reasons. One - it is a turf field and that should enable us to take ground balls and hit - regardless of the weather! Two - I played for Frank Papasedero back in college. Frank was a hard nosed man, crazy at times (I have a million stories) and a super baseball mind. This will be my first time on HIS field, and I am getting goose pimples just thinking about it.

I will be perhaps pressed for time. At this time practice will run from 11:00 to 12:30. PLEASE DO YOUR BEST TO GET THERE twenty minutes early. We can shoe up, get loose and start USING the field at 11:00. NO METAL CLEATS ALLOWED.

The field is located in the old Navy base off of Sand Point Way and 65th street. Go in through the 65th street entrance and take a left before you hit the boat ramp area, I think it is marked. You may want to take a look at the map for Sand Point. Google FRANK PAPASEDERO FIELD and you will find it.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Welcome to the blog site for the MBC 13 year old team. This is the site where I will post news about the team, schedules, changes to the schedule, apologies due to scheduling errors, inspirational messages and game write-ups.

There is also a magnoliabaseballclub.com website that will have schedules and write-ups and stats and such. That site is out of my control and harder to make changes to. This site will be more apt to have the real deal, changes. For example the other site will post a calender early in the season. If a game time changes, or gets rescheduled or a practice is cancelled, it sometimes will NOT be changed on that schedule. When in doubt rely on this one or a verbal from me (calls are always a valid way to communicate, if I have you confused, your call is no bother).

For examples of how this site will work, go look at the one from a couple of years ago
- http://www.mbc13.blogspot.com/