Monday, May 03, 2010

2010 LYB Major Angels Game #10

The Angels played their tenth game of the 2010 Laguna Youth Baseball Major season. They played the Diamondbacks. The Angels beat the Diamondbacks by a score of 14 to 2 in early April.

At the plate, Jack was 0 for 1 with a walk. He walked on 4 pitches in his first plate appearance. In his second at-bat, Jack struck out swinging on three pitches against Rideout.

Jack had a very nice game in the field. He played two innings at third base and three innings at first.

At third with runners on the second and third and one out in the second inning, Jack had a hard grounder hit at him that took a big hop into his chest. While struggling to find the handle, he trapped the ball against his upper body with his bare hand and his glove hand.

With the runner charging from second, Jack swung around, sweeping his glove hand out to tag the runner. Standing behind the pitcher, the field umpire called the runner out.

Continuing to spin completely around in a circle, I saw him from my vantage point behind home plate set himself, pull the ball out of his glove and throw the ball to first, but the runner beat the throw.

Now for the rest of the story...

After the inning was over Rod (Greysen’s dad) came over and told me that Jack never had the ball in his glove. Talking to Jack after the game, the ball was in his bare hand against his chest. After the sweep tag on the runner, Jack said he pulled the glove hand back to chest and put the ball into the glove as he was spinning. He essentially had his back to both umpires at that point.

From the vantage point of both the umpires and I, all we saw was the sweep tag, Jack spinning in a circle, him setting his feet, pulling the ball away from the glove with his bare hand and making the throw to first…


At first, Jack had two put-outs. In the fourth, he took a throw from the second baseman for the put-out. With the Angels holding a small lead in the top of the sixth, Jack made a couple of great plays to help end the game. The number three D-Backs' hitter drove a ball to the left side; Greysen was playing short and went deep into the hole for the ball. Greysen's throw to first was late and high. Jack jumped straight up to just barely snag the ball in the webbing of his glove to keep the runner at first. With the runner advancing to third on two steals, the D-backs clean-up hitter than hit a 3 and 1 pitch right down the first base line. Jack almost plucked the ball out of the air a couple inches above the ground, but could not quite hold on to it. He calmly picked up the ball and stepped on first for the out. If Jack does not knock the ball down, a run scores, the batter gets at least a double and the tying run comes to the bat.

With the game tied 3 to 3 in the bottom of the fifth, the Angels scored 3 runs and went on to win by the score of 6 to 3. The box score is here and the game log is here. The Angels now have 9 wins and 1 loss for the season.

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