Senior Year Box Set

Jeff wasn’t buying it. I agreed.

“My mom made me,” I admitted.

“Go with that one,” Jeff said.

He did a quick interview and then told me he would see me before practice. At least he wasn’t going to follow me around all day.

◊◊◊

Moose gathered us around in the locker room before practice to announce the regional seedings. Jeff had joined us with his camerawoman so they’d have the footage for the piece he was doing.

“We’ve been selected as the number one seed and will be playing number eight seed Lakeview tomorrow. When we win that game, our next opponent will either be Eastside or Mt. Vernon, and we will play them on Thursday,” Moose shared.

He read off the rest of the regional pairings. St. Joe wasn’t among them because of the debacle that transpired after they threw at me earlier in the year. The number two seed was Washington. If it all played out to script, we would meet them in the regional finals on Saturday. The winner would go on to sectionals.

Sectionals would be another eight-team tournament where the winner would move on to state. At state, the four sectional winners would face off in a two-game, winner-takes-all championship.

“Why don’t they play this as a double-elimination tournament?” Jeff asked.

“Three reasons,” Moose answered. “The first is they want to let as many teams have a shot as possible.”

“But is that fair to a team like yours that only has one loss to be playing a barely five hundred team?”

“I see your point. But I’ve been there with similar records before. I think it’s important that other teams at least get the chance to have a Cinderella experience and surprise some folks,” Moose said.

“What are the other two reasons?” Jeff asked.

“The second is that’s how it’s always been done. Baseball is a game of traditions, after all. The third is we only have a limited amount of time. If we used a double-elimination format, each eight-team tournament would require us to play 4 or 5 games rather than the three we play now,” Moose explained.

After Jeff had everything he needed, Moose told me to lead the team out to warm up for practice.

◊◊◊ Tuesday April 25

As the number one seed, we would be at home for our game.

The saying goes that April showers bring May flowers. That held true for today because it was raining when I rode to school. The problem with weather like this was that if the field became too wet to play on, we would have to push our game to tomorrow.

The forecast predicted rain for the rest of the week. Our goal was to play today because if we didn’t, it would have a domino effect of bunching up games to get them all in this week.

That was important because of pitching rotations. High school wasn’t like the major leagues where you could bring in a pitcher on back-to-back nights. We followed a pitch-count rule.

The rule said that any appearance that didn’t exceed the 30-pitch mark required no rest, which allowed a pitcher who pitched short-term to pitch the next day if needed. They did have a three-day rule, though. You couldn’t throw on three consecutive days, no matter your count.

Other pitch-count requirements said that you couldn’t throw more than 105 pitches in a day. The required recovery periods were four days for 76 to 105 pitches; three days for 61 to75 pitches; two days for 46 to 60 pitches; and one day for 31 to 45 pitches.

The reason for the 105-pitch maximum was that a high school pitcher threw an average of fifteen pitches per inning. Simple math said that over seven innings, an average game would have 105 balls thrown.

I was impressed that Moose had been using three to four pitchers a game for the last few. I suspected he wanted to be flexible with our pitching. That way, if we got our games jammed up because of the weather, we shouldn’t lose the use of key players because of the mandated recovery time.

It also let our pitchers cut loose because they knew they would only be pitching a couple of innings. They didn’t have to worry about getting tired.

We’d moved up our game time because the rain had subsided. My weather app showed a wall of storms coming our way, though. The school let the baseball team out of classes two periods before the end of the day to get ready.

Lakeview had planned ahead and was already dressed for the game when their bus pulled up. We exited the field to allow them to get ready. While they went through their warm-up drills, I gathered our team together for a quick pep talk.

“I want you all to recognize that this is the game we might lose. Admit it, you all are thinking Lakeview will be an easy win,” I said.

“It should be,” Wolf said.

“That’s precisely the reason you all should be worried. All Lady Luck has to do is look down at our arrogance and decide to mess with us. A ball takes a funny bounce, an umpire misses a call, one of you boneheads hangs a fastball that gets parked. I could go on, but you get what I’m saying. That’s why we need to focus and take them out.