Baseball Wrap-Up

So, I just finished up my first season of baseball in 8 years. Overall, it went pretty well. I liked my team a lot, we got along very well. We didn't up doing very well in the end, we were pretty inconsistent, but there were definitely some positives. We've hung out since the end of the season, and the team should be pretty stable going in to next year. With a little more depth in our pitching (especially in terms of accuracy), fewer errors, and more offensive discipline we should do really well.

Personally, I thought my season when really well, especially considering the layoff that I had coming into the season. There was definitely some rust in the beginning, but I shook it off pretty quickly. At the start of the season I was hitting a lot of pitches close to the hands and getting a lot of weak grounders. It turns out the solution was pretty simple: Step back from the plate. It took until almost halfway through the season for a teammate to tell me that, but once he did, I started to hit a lot of hard line drives. In the last game of the season I hit my first (out of the park) homerun ever. Too bad it ended up not counting (stupid time limits).

Defensively, I played center field for most of the year, which is something new, I had played infield almost exclusively growing up. The results weren't too bad. I could have definitely used some more practice tracking fly balls ( I let a few over my head that I shouldn't have). In terms of throwing, my performance wasn't bad, but I had to hold back at times because of elbow pain. I'm definitely going to put some time in to throwing during the off season to build up my arm strength. I've been looking into some training programs and I'm going to incorporate some long toss. I'll get into details in a new post once I start with that, for now, I need some time off from throwing.

I'm so happy that I got to play again this year. I'm hooked. I love baseball. I've been reading constantly since the season finished. I'll get into that in a future post. For now, I'm going to try and watch some games around the city, and see if there's another league I can play in next season, in addition to Martingrove.

Mobile Blog #1

It's been a long time since I posted last. I've been busy, and a little distracted. I just downloaded the Blogger Android app. Hopefully that will help me keep up with the blog, even if it's just small posts here or there.
I've been playing baseball since May. It's the first time in 8 years. I've picked the skills back up pretty quickly. I had some elbow pain when I first started, but that's been much better lately.
Yesterday I started San Shou class at my kung fu club. Today I'm in pain. We started with break-falls and some takedown drills, before we got in to some sparring. It was a good class, the mix of students works well for me. There were a couple guys with more experience than me, one around my size, one smaller, and 1 guy who's a bit less skilled than me. I traded punches with the first 2 guys, the fights were pretty close, but I definitely got the worst of it. The first guy (bigger guy) wasn't punching too much, but he did stop most of my takedown attempts and turned them around to take me down, 1 time pretty hard.
Weight training has taken a back seat for a bit, and probably will for the next little while. I'm still following high performance mass principles, though I'm not getting in the volume, or frequency. I get 1 back and biceps workout per week. Lower body is power snatch, front and back squats. For upper body pressing I'm sticking to a mix of barbell and kettlebell overhead presses, and will do that as long as my shoulders feel good, I need to be careful while I'm playing baseball. So, this turned out to be pretty thorough blog, and it's not too bad typing on my phone (touch screen). I'll be back with more soon.