Day 4 - 5

So I have a few days to catch up on...  I have been pretty busy / lazy during my hotel time so I'm going to do my best to catch you guys up on the past few days.  I have a feeling this entry will be a little long so bear with me.  One thing I'm going to try and do is give you some insight into some of the lesser known intricacies of baseball as well as my experiences over the past few days so enjoy!

Day 4 was pretty standard.  It was the final day of just having the pitchers around.  We ran through the usual gambit of PFP's and bunting.  One thing that did stick out at the end was sitting down to eat lunch and having Barry Larkin there eating with all of us.  Barry was an iconic player for the Reds while I was growing up and seeing him around was pretty special.  I didn't get to talk to him as he was here to work with our position players, but it was still pretty cool.

After our day was over at the field, I left with a trio of Canadian teammates instead of going back to the hotel.  They were living over at a fellow countryman's house in Peoria.  He is in big league camp with the Blue Jays.  We went to his house for a bit and hung out.  Later on, they invited me to go to the NHL game at 7.  The Phoenix Coyotes were playing the Vancouver Canucks.  I had only been to a Cyclones game, never an NHL game, let alone with 3 Canadians who had grown up on cross checks and slapshots, so I decided to tag along with them.  The Canucks are currently one of the top teams in the league and the Coyotes are in playoff hunt so it was set to be a good game.  I say next to Mike Henry also known as "Hank" and he answered the multitude of questions I had for him.  I had seen many a NHL game on TV, but it doesn't compare in person.  It's like NASCAR, it's just not watching unless you're there.  After a heated game and a few sick goals, the Canucks won in overtime.  After the game, Lotzkar dropped me off at the hotel where I met up with Ralph.  Last year during my time here in AZL, I would come down to the hotel bar and eat on our offday.  I would invariably end up starting a conversation with the other inhabitants of the hotel.  Ralph worked as a Federal Agent in the FBI for 20 or so years and therefore had a ton of cool stories to share.  He also demonstrated his ability to be a human lie detector.  I've never been a good liar, so I was an easy target, but it was cool nonetheless.  Ralph was back in town for business and so we sat at the bar and caught up.  Another interesting thing about him is that he's also an avid racquetball player.  He is currently sponsored by Pro Kennex, the same company that sponsored me during my active racquetball years.  Pro Kennex isn't one of the more common companies so it was interesting to come across him.  After a long day at the field, the NHL game, and some conversation, I was spent.  I was practically out by the time my head hit my pillow.

Day 5 was the first day with hitters, so that brought some new changes.  Instead of stretching as a unit, all the players broke into their respective teams and then stretched on their fields.  It was great to see some of the hitters again.  Usually baseball teams are broken into pitchers and hitters with not too much interaction between.  That lends itself of pitchers hanging out with pitchers and hitters hanging out with hitters.  The only interaction between the two outside of the actual game is the occasional joke made about athleticism.  The position players insist that they're the "real athletes" and pitchers are the "non-athletes".  The only correlation between pitchers and the lack of athleticism exists when analyzing lefty pitchers.  Righties are the only true athletes.  Even Browning (himself a lefty have you), when announcing which side everyone will be throwing on will say, "non-athletes down the left field line (hitters) and true athletes over here (referring to the pitchers)."  This leads to the same old arguments and comments which ends up getting us nowhere.  However, through all the typical snide remarks and insults, I found myself very happy to see a lot of these guys again.  I found that since we crushed the last month of the season that we really grew together as a team.  It's amazing what a lot of winning will do for the morale and relationships among the players while off the field.  It's also amazing what losing will do too.

As a quick recap from last year, we won something ridiculous like the last 23 of 26 games to finish the season.  We needed to win every one of those games to make the playoffs.  We ended up closing out the season with a half game lead in the wildcard race and had to take on the number one seed in the Giants in the first round.  The Giants had a very experienced team with an even more talented pitching staff.  We had a mostly young guys but one thing we did have was a lot of momentum.  We took a large lead early which was held by out starter, Ishmael Guillon.  Once he came out the Giants managed to rally and get within one run.  I came in the 9th inning for the close. The Giants had 2 corner outfielders who were at least over 6'5" a piece.  I had one of them up with 2 outs and got ahead 0-2. I hung a slider to one of them earlier in the season and he hit it about 9000 feet...foul.  If you want to see this exact pitch, you can check it out on Facebook.  My brother happened to record it and put it on the video he made of me pitching in AZL.  Anyways, I ended up hanging another slider to him this time and he hit a lazer right at our 3rd basemen who promptly gobbled it up and threw it to first for the win and save.

Even though we lost in the final game of the playoffs to the Brewers, we had grown as a team.  In my mind it was pretty special because winning at the end of the year isn't usually a matter of beating the other team, it's just a matter of wanting to win.  What I mean is that the season is very long and draining and usually in the final month of the season many guys will not care if they win or lose as a team as long as they get to go home and don't make the playoffs.  I've heard of this happening in summer ball and here in pro-ball.  This especially applies to teams on the fringe of making the playoffs.  We were on the fringe last year, but instead of wanting to lose games, we made the final push and secured a spot in the playoffs.

So it's great seeing all the guys again.  If we can manage to stay together as a team, we should have a similar fate as last year.  On this day, pitchers didn't have to show up until after 1 or so since the hitters had all the physicals and what not that we had to go through a few days earlier.  The problem with this is that the Reds didn't provide us with later shuttles.  If you wanted guaranteed transportation to the field you would have to leave at latest 8 am shuttle.  You would then spend the next 5 hours doing nothing at the field.  That left the pitchers with trying to find their own way to the yard.  I was lucky to have Lotzkar who picked me up and let me squeeze in behind him in his sweet SS Camaro.

After stretching as a squad, we went over bunt plays and picks.  As you move up the ladder in baseball the game obviously gets a little quick and also a little more complicated.  You have to find a way to neutralize the great players on the other team.  Well one way a pitcher can do this is through pick offs.  Within the realm of pickoffs you have ones that are called from the dug out and relayed through the catcher, you also have situational pickoffs like ones relayed through bunt coverages and 1st and 3rd defenses.  You also have timing picks that are relayed from the any of the fielders to you between pitches and also daylight picks that are called with an open glove as the fielder breaks toward the bag.  Finally you have voluntary picks which is your standard, throw-whenever-you-feel-like-it pick.  Seems like a lot, which it is, but it's mostly the same plays you've practiced growing up, just with different signs.  It's always just a matter of doing the drills a few times to get the feel back and confidence up.  However, these aren't things that you can just go through the motions because the odds are you will only practice it in spring training and be expected to recall everything and perform correctly months down the road during the season with a game on the line.

So after reviewing the plays and getting a few reps in we went into BP.  Batting practice is something that every baseball player has to sit through on a day in and day out for an entire season.  Sessions usually last anywhere between 60 and (more often than not) 90 minutes.  As a pitcher, this time is usually spent shagging balls or performing a duty.  The duties include standing on first or second base to receive ground balls from infielders, catching up fungo (depending on the coach), and finally the much loathed bucket duty.  I'll get to the bucket in a second, but first there's shagging.  As a pitcher, ideally you'll be evenly spread out along the warning track behind all the outfielders and get the balls that they can't track down.  Well it gets kind of lonely (not to say boring) just sitting there for 90 minutes without anyone to talk to.  So over time, the pitchers will slowly start shifting toward each other to form a group. If you have a strict manager that enforced the spread out rule, then you have to resort to other forms of amusement which usually involves the aforementioned guy on the bucket.

Again, ideally a ball hit to you will result in you making a nice accurate throw into the guy manning the bucket so the balls can get recycled.  However, this is rarely the case.  Allow me to elaborate.  There are 5 types of shaggers during BP: the sandbagger, power shagger, buzzer beater, sniper, and the bullpen thrower.  There was a blog article outlining this phenomenon a few years back but I couldn't find it.  So I will do my best to paraphrase his description from memory.

First off is the sandbagger (also known as the fisherman).  He is the guy that will only field a ball that is right to him.  Once he gets that ball, instead of throwing the ball all the way into the bucket (no short distance), he will just lob it about 50 feet in front of him.  Since the pitchers are by the warning track, 50 feet is incredibly closer to him  than the guy actually collecting the balls on the bucket.  Over the course of 90 minutes the sandbagger will throw each progressive ball a little closer to the guy on the bucket to set the line.  As the guy on the bucket, you won't go 200 feet away to collect balls, but if there is a steady line of baseballs every 5 feet you're more likely to take the bait.  Before you know it, you're all the way out to the warning track with more balls than you can carry looking like a complete rookie.  This is also called fishing.  Next is the powershagger.  He is the guy (usually a pitcher) that wants to demonstrate his athleticism by tracking down every ball that is hit to his part of the field.  Most guys take the less-is-more approach to BP which means they won't go after anything that's more than a few steps from them.  The powershagger takes is upon himself to run everything down and even make diving plays on liners in the gaps.  After a running grab he'll usually look around to make sure people saw him make the play and make some comment about how he should be a position player or something along the lines of water covering 2/3 of the earth and him covering the rest.  The next guy is the buzzer beater.  Instead of throwing the ball in and having it stop after a nice 10 yard roll toward the bucket, he decides to turn the bucket into a basket and try to make it in...from 200 feet out.  The only thing that gets hit during these shots is the guy on the bucket.  The thing is is that when you cut a shot off you'll get the proverbial, "that ball was going in!"  This is then followed by the once upon a time legend where he made one from 200 feet away with his eyes closed, or something along those lines.

Next is the sniper.  This guy turns the pitcher on the bucket into his primary target.  He'll save up a few balls and when the bucket guy isn't looking, he'll zing one past his ear in an attempt to smoke him in the back.  The friendly ones will settle for hitting you on the bounce, but the more ruthless, direct hit guys exist on every team.  Finally, last but not least, is the bullpen pitcher.  While you have the pitcher acting as a position player in a powershagger, here you have the opposite: a position player acting as a pitcher.  This guy will summon the bucket guy to come over and crouch down like a catcher so he can show off his new pitch.  This new pitch is NEVER a fastball, or anything that moves relatively straight.  No, it's some type of knuckle-curve-splitter that results in the catcher having to block a ball that bounces right in front of him.  It turns a normal day of BP into an adventure.

So needless to say, we finished off BP and for the first time since I've been here, had a day off running.  I went back home and proceeded to be lazy for the next few hours.  I was planning on writing about today's exploits but since this turned into the longest blog post ever, I'll spare you the time.  I'll add it as a separate entry tomorrow, if you've even read down this point.

Until next time.