By: Austin Alexander – March 29, 2014 Rain, rain, go away, come back another day…like maybe during basketball season! The real March Madness has been the monsoon month of March… What a year it has been so far in terms of spring baseball and aweful weather. Coaches and scouts have long since had to have a little feel for meteorology, but it has been some time since we have had to follow the radar, tarp fields, drop diamond dry and re-arrange schedules like we have in 2014. Precipitation of all types has been the theme of our young campaign. Our staff has seen fewer games and teams to this point than in any other spring, it’s really frustrating! It almost makes you wish we had all chosen basketball as our sport of choice! No other sport must deal with the constant change of the wind, of clouds, of storms. In our sport, we play or practice nearly every day and our fields are always subject to the heavens and what may rain, snow, sleet or blow in from above. When trying to arrange bus departures, meals, hotels, umpires, pitching rotations and budgets around surprises makes a high school baseball coaches job so much more difficult than the guy who is in charge of his hoops facility and biggest problem is often making sure that he has not forgotten to pack his easel and dry erase markers! Now consider the college coach that has all of those same issues with his own team to deal with, not to mention trying to jam a sixth game into every week as to not lose RPI points toward a possible NCAA berth, sorting out recruiting visits, along with the ever-present decision of whether he should jump in the car to see a prospect and drive “X” amount of miles/hours only to watch it rain, then turn around and drive the same distance back…all while trying to retain his job. How about the plight of pro scouts who have to be somewhere watching baseball almost every single night. Depending on the scout’s territory, the race against Mother Nature turns into many nights of dodging the Doppler nightmare that covers your region and eventually costs you another opportunity to knock out 2-4 teams in a day. Then there is the matter of arranging the flight plans of your cross-checker, whose nationwide nights are already limited. You’ve finally got it all sorted out, the guy you are courting is on the mound and your boss is all set to board an airplane to roll in…then you check the most recent weather report and your territory is covered in green, yellow and red! All of the aforementioned examples make the best of us wonder how life would be different had we chosen basketball! I am reminded of a recent example that appropriately puts my theory into play: In my last coaching job, our offices were in an auxiliary gym, we shared it with the softball staff and the gym was attached, housing an occasional team practice that may be moved indoors for various reasons. One December afternoon, all four coaches on our staff were hard at work when the women’s basketball coach barged in wanting to use the phone and forge a complaint to someone in the athletic department as to why the floor had not been mopped after the men’s practice 30 minutes before. The only reason they were even displaced was because of a concert that night and the main gymnasium was off limits. One day out of their element and literally minutes to make their playing surface “playable” and all of Hades had broken loose! Now, we really liked this coach and greatly respected she and her staff. But after seeing just how riled up she became over something that probably set them back five minutes was absolutely comical to us after her rant on the phone, then her departure! We immediately began to reminisce some of the memories we had of making constant adjustments to the elements, bundling up to move snow, pushing water and sacrificing your teams practice to get a field ready to go. Then you start to think about the many times during a game that the personnel you use and how the decisions you make is affected based on weather reports you get from inning to inning. Imagine if basketball coaches had to polish the floor every other day and line the entire court before each game. Imagine if the scoreboard fell to the deck moments before tip-off. What if every shot were contested by the wind and if the trainer informed a coach that a tornado was approaching, that they better be leading by the end of the third quarter when the game would become official? Here’s you another image! Can you see Rick Pitino, John Calapari or Coach K pulling a tarp in torrential showers wearing Armani suits to secure a victory? How different are these two sports in regards to dealing with the elements? Our game is a great game! We follow it and have given our lives to it because we believe it is the best game of all! When we hear that our daily destination is in the path of rain, sleet or snow, man-o-man you can’t help but wish you had chosen basketball as your first love! BUT, perhaps baseball mirrors real life more than any other sport. The constant bout with the weather in baseball forces you to adjust on the fly and make important decision on your feet…almost every single day. You must roll with the punches and deal with the surprises without skipping a beat, much like reality outside the lines. Having said that, I did say a special prayer this morning at church requesting sunny skies for a while, fewer adjustments and more baseball to be played…because Lord knows we have sure earned some good weather!

By: Richard Edwards – March 27, 2009  It’s been quite a few years ago but I still remember coming home from my first organized baseball experience and being asked by my mother, "What position are you playing?" I don’t recall the exact thought process that went into my decision. Maybe it’s because there never was really any other position for me. I told her, "Catcher" and practically saw her eyes begin to water. Being eight years old, I really didn’t understand what the problem was. I mean, why wouldn’t anyone want to catch and get to wear all that equipment? It was a neat thing for me. Others that thought it took the intelligence of a mule to want to play there might beg to differ with my opinion. To them, the catcher’s mask, chest protector and shin guards are truly "tools of ignorance". Either Bill Dickey or Muddy Ruel, who caught for the great Walter Johnson in the 1920’s, came up with the phrase "tools of ignorance". Both claimed its origin came from an ironic contrast between the intelligence needed to play the position with the foolishness required to play something that requires that much equipment to protect you from injury. The equipment has changed quite a bit over the years. Skull caps and hockey style masks are designed today to protect the catcher from foul tips. I remember just turning your regular cap backwards. I guess I’m showing my age by saying that. Los Angeles Dodgers’ trainer Bill Buhler designed and patented the throat protector that dangles from the masks of most catchers and quite a few umpires after Dodger catcher Steve Yeager was hit with part of a broken bat in the neck, piercing his esophagus, while he waited in the on-deck circle in a 1976 game. Today chest protectors are equipped with flaps to better cover the shoulder area. Shin guards are designed to protect even part of the area above the knee and on top of the foot. Knee savers were designed to protect the ligaments of the catcher’s knees. Technology has come a long way. I was not excluded from injuries during my playing career. I was blessed with a great throwing arm and loved being the last line of defense to preventing a run. I only remember one year, when I was 12, that I did not do a lot of catching. That year, I played shortstop and pitched. But at 13, it was back behind the dish and doing what I did best. Growing up in Minnesota, I naturally had an appreciation for ice hockey. I remember playing a little game within a game blocking pitches in the dirt. If the ball got past me, it was like the puck going in the net and the light coming on. It was my job to sacrifice my body to keep that from happening. Often that resulted in badly bruised arms and legs. That didn’t bother me though because there was no better feeling than crouching behind a plate and playing the game that I loved. Being the last line of defense meant you would be faced with collisions at the plate. Back in my day, there were no protective rules about sliding to avoid those collisions. You were fair game as the runner churned toward home. I remember two collisions to this day. One knocked me a little silly (my wife thinks there may have been permanent damage) and the other resulted in a chin cut that required me to leave the game to go to the hospital to get stitches. I didn’t notice the cut until I was calling signals to the next batter and saw blood dripping down on my uniform pants. I have a scar on my chin as a reminder of that incident. After those two plays, I had a deep understanding of what Ray Fosse felt in the 1970 All-Star game when Pete Rose bowled him over at the plate and dramatically altered his career. If you or your son catches today, count it a blessing that safety rules have been put in to prevent serious injuries involving plays at the plate. My only real serious injury came in the pre-season of my freshman year of high school on the varsity squad. I had made the team as a ninth grader and was challenging for the starting position. It would turn out to be a high and a low point of my playing career. Unfortunately for me, I got lazy in batting practice one day and rested my throwing hand on my right leg only to have a foul tip glance off a bat and crush one of my knuckles. Not a smart thing on my part. I finished the practice by rolling the ball back to the pitcher and went home and hid the injury from my parents over the weekend, hoping that it if I soaked it, it would just magically go away. That wasn’t very smart either and the injury didn’t go away. My hand swelled up like a balloon and I missed the entire season. That was a real bummer. But, I got the cast off after several weeks, was playing the next day, and was back behind the plate before long, even though that was an awkward feeling. A lot of catchers don’t hit particularly well, at least for average. That was the weakest part of my game. To this day I blame some of it on poor eye sight that was not corrected until I was in college. There’s a distant chance it could have been a lack of hitting skill but I’ll stick with the former reason. I’m just guessing but catchers probably hit for a lower average than any other position on the field, other than pitchers. If you don’t know or have ever wondered why, read the previous few paragraphs of this article over again. Along with bumps and bruises from foul tips and blocking balls in the dirt, with …

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