All-star season predictions!

CADad:

If I remember right you said at one time you are in the Temecula Area, maybe we can get a practice game going? My 14 yo plays with the 14U Corona PONY All-Stars. They have been using the name Corona Titans for Pre All-Star tournaments and are 7-2. One bad inning cost them the Championship on Sunday. We have 3 pitcher that have yet to allow a run. So far I have been glad my boy is doing well. 9 innings pitched, WHIP of .777 K to BB is 18 to 4 (4.5 to 1)

HCD,
No, I think that's IrishDad who is from Temecula. We are northwest of Los Angeles a couple hours or so drive from you. I've got the Pony 13 B team so I doubt we'd make a decent sparring partner for you anyways. I've got a couple pitchers your guys wouldn't crush but would hit and that's about as good as it would get from our end.

CADad:

Maybe Corona's PONY B 13's will see your's. Corona is hosting this year but I don't remember if it is Section or Region.

AllStar predictions!!

Hey CADAD I have a couple.

I am predicting POWAY American or National to go all the way to Williamsport, you heard it here first.

For Bronco Pony 12 Team I am going with MIRAMESA RED , they have alot of studs on that team and know quite a few of them.

I've seen the draw for our district/section Pony 13 and I think we can reach the semis out of pool play. We'll have to beat a good team and manage the arms of our pitchers pretty well to go any further than that, since we play 3 pool play games in 5 days followed by the semifinals on day 5 and the finals on day 6 if we make it that far. Hard to do with only 3 starters and one reliever.

Our 13A team will be facing some tough teams but has fewer games to play to get through so their two stud pitchers should be able to carry them.

HCD,
If we pull off an upset and win we'd go to Long Beach for Region.

We host Sections starting July 5th. Not sure who is hosting Riv Co. Regionals, perhaps Chino Hills. We play in Rowland Heights this weekend. Another prelim.

Best of luck to you and your's! Perhaps we will meet at Zone?

HCD,
I think you've got a pretty good chance of seeing our A team at zone. They're pretty good with two top pitchers, both throwing in the low 70s who know how to pitch. They may not have quite enough depth as I think I may have the league's #3 and #4 pitchers, although there's not much difference from 3 through 6 and you would get many different rankings of 3 through 6. About the only thing you'd get agreement on is that one pitcher on the A team decided to stop throwing curves after all-stars were selected and is no longer the pitcher he was even though he never threw that many curves.

Our Pony league hasn't announced the All Star teams yet. My son might be on the 13 yo Team. The league next to us, Heartwell, will have a very competitive 13 yo team. They will at least make the regionals, which in the past includes the area you are from CADad. I know whith my middle son we went out to Camarillo. Out team has also gone to Covina, so I am not sure where the Region actually is.

kjktj;

Our Pinto team just played against the East Long Beach pinto team Saturday, good game 4-2 we ended up on the short side. Looking forward to playing them again I think we can put up a better performance. Good luck on making the team to your son. Kind of late for deciding who is on the team tho. Most other have been playing prelims for 2-3 weeks.

Both Long Beach and Heartwell(Lakewood) play regular season up to this week and the ALL-Star teams aren't announced until the season is over. Our teams usually play about 30-35 games in their season.

That's a great season, 30-35, most leagues get in 20-24. Good luck on the team announcing.

We only play 18. On the other hand we try to have A and B teams for each division and age group so that almost every player who is available gets to play another 7 to 10 games at least in the post season. The league is strong enough that the B teams are usually fairly competitive.

CaDad:

We play in Glendora this weekend. Henderson Field. I see acouple of 13U teams Listed. Your team playing in there this weekend?

HCD,
No. We're playing in the Los Virgenes tournament. Our quarterfinal game is Sunday. We were the 3 seed from our pool and we're playing the 2 seed from the other pool.

We've got a reasonable shot at Sunday's game and if we win it a reasonable shot at Monday's game. If we win that one we'd probably run into our A team in the championship round. I was talking to their coach and he was telling me he gunned their top pitcher at 79 max, their #2 pitcher at 76 max and their number 3 at 73 max.

Our 13A team should win this warmup tournament but they've got an extremely tough draw in their district/section tournament with a team having an 80+ pitcher in their pool and since the semis and finals are single elimination they could be stopped by one good game.

We've got a pretty good draw in our district/section tournament and although there are better teams than us we've got a shot because the strongest teams are in the other pool which is playing 3 pool play games while our pool is only playing 2. We may be able to juggle our pitching so that we have one of our stronger pitchers going in each of the semis and the finals if we can get there.

Good Hunting. The first game of our 3rd Prelims tonight at 5:30 My Sons has got the nod for the start. It will be rough even if we win both games in pool play we could end up in the consolation bracket if we give up too many runs.

Hope to meet you later.

HCD

HCD,
We won our game on Sunday but even if we win tonight we won't face our A team in the finals as they were beaten yesterday. I watched the last few innings and West Hills was hitting our A team's mid to high 70s kid pretty hard. He also got poor support in the field as they were missing their starting shortstop and starting catcher and didn't get the kids in the right positions otherwise.

Congradulations!



We got knocked out yesterday afternoon. 5-4. Week end was good. AS Manager is getting on the kids nerves by yelling at them when the make an error but never his own kid it is always some excuse.

My boy is pitching well for the Post season, he has the highest number of innings pitched, we re watching his count carefully because the Mgr. love the curve. He threw 80 pitches for 6 innings Saturday, iced him up after word then threw 60 Sunday afternoon. I told the Mgr. no curve balls, FB, CU, Split only. (The kids fingers are as long as mine.) 4 innings 3 ER on 4 hits. 1 BB 2 K's. Not gonna let this pitching happen again even though he did well the long term effect is bad. Here are his over all numbers, I am very proud of the kid.

IP:19.00 H:8 K:28 BB:4 W:3 L:0 Sv:0 ERA:1.84

HCD,
Great results but way too risky.

We lost last night in the semifinals but I protested before the game started when I learned the other team had several 14yo on the team. We were playing in the Pony13 division of the tournament. It got complicated because for some reason the tournament had allowed this team into the Pony 13 division knowing that they had 14yo on the team. It wasn't hard for us to figure out some of the kids were 14 because they were literally 6' 260 lbs. Those kids didn't have that much impact but their leadoff hitter who looked to be 14 was a stud. As my coach said, "If you are going to bring 14yo into a 13yo tournament they should look 13 not 17."

Even so we should have beaten them but we are a B team who suffered an injury to our starting catcher in the first game of the tournament and that hurt us. We have another decent catcher who caught the previous game but his knees were hurting so I had our regular shortstop catch. He doesn't really like to catch and didn't do a very good job. I put our best athlete at short and he made some good plays and blew some easy ones in key situations. We also got routine balls hit to our B outfielders who misjudged them. Then at the plate, we hit the ball hard but drove the ball right to them. Just one of those days. My son threw 2 2/3 and gave up several runs. The first inning told the story. He warmed up throwing strike after strike then went 2-0 on the leadoff man. He got the side 1,2,3 but threw 16 pitches doing so. He struggled in the second with an error or two behind him and then had to be pulled in the third when he clearly got frustrated at the lack of support and lost his command. We got back within a couple runs after 5 when our shortstop hit an 0-2 line drive over the right field fence but our relief pitcher who threw well just didn't have the ability to shut them down.

I'm a little different. I tend to yell at my own kid and not at the others. Fortunately my son had a decent day at the plate. After taking a first pitch strike and ending up striking out his first at bat he finished with a couple line drive singles. We'd had a long talk about being aggressive and looking for first pitch fastballs to hit so I wasn't too happy with him after the first at bat. The second at bat he hit the first strike he saw and the third at bat he was taking his cuts but reaching for the ball. After fouling a couple off we let him know a change was coming (saw the pitcher's grip) and he hammered one to right center.

Don't know for sure but it looks like we'll get a chance to play for the championship. The right thing to do would be for us to play the team that the 14yo team beat in the quarters and for the winner of that game to play for the championship but I don't think there's enough time to do that. The tournament also has the sticky issue of having let the 14yo team into the tournament so they owe them their chance to play. My guess is that they'll have them play the other team that qualified for the finals on Wednesday and then have us play them on Friday. That way the 14yo team will get their games, we'll get our games and the other 13yo finalist team will get an extra game.

CaDad

Thank you for this topic. It's interesting that so few, if any, discuss Dixie Youth Baseball. Last year our Dixie youth Minor's made it to the World Series. We don't have LL here, but we do have pretty good baseball in the south and Dixie baseball is very big for our eleven southern states.

This year, six players on my son's Major All Star team made it to Minor League WS last year. That means that we have a large number of 11yo's on this team. While that is great for next year, it realistically limits our likelihood to advance this year.

Having said that, our Sub-District begins this weekend and we will certainly do our best to advance to the District. Our District is the best in South Carolina, so we'll see how it goes.

Please wish us luck and I will let you know how it went.

R.

Good luck Cal, to you and yours. I wish you the best of success.

Callaway,
Best of luck and hope Boomer has a great tournament.
CADad

CaDad you have a PM.

HCD,
Back atcha.

Well we ended up losing in the finals of the tournament 10-7. Not bad for a B team especially considering the A team lost 12-5 to the same team in the semifinals. They started a fairly hard thrower. My son lined a 2 out rbi single to left on the first pitch he saw. His second at bat he lined one just over the left fielder for a another 2 out rbi and a double. His 3rd at bat wasn't quite up to snuff. They had brought in a slower thrower and he was out front fouling off a couple. He took a change and was able to see that it was so slow that he didn't have to worry about it. I told him to be a 2-strike hitter which is code for look for a fastball away. He looked for a change and struck out looking at a not particularly hard fastball. Overall still a good day at the plate.

We had a shot in the 7th with runners on 2nd and 3rd and no outs. Our #3 hitter flew out to center and with me saying "wait, wait.." our runner on third took off ridiculously early. All I could do was hope the plate ump didn't see it. He did and so did the other team. That pretty much finished us off.

Tomorrow is the big day, opening games of the Corona Sectionals. My son has been tagged to start and I am please that the manager and I have talked and he knows the kid has other pitches that are very effective.

We play at 7:30 and again I may be to excited to sleep.

8u pinto first game is Wednesday at 5:00. Again very excited. I was blessed this weekend to be able to hear coaches from other teams paying respected compliments about my son. I am sure we all enjoy hearing other coaches talk good about our kids, even better when they don't know it is your kid, you know they are being genuine.

HCD,
I've tagged our other relatively hard thrower to start our first pool play game on Thursday and our medium speed strike thrower to finish that one. My son has been inconsistent so I'll throw him in our second pool play game against the stronger team. It is more important to win the first one as that should be enough to get us to the semifinals. I'll then bring the first pitcher back on Sunday if we make the semi's and my son back on Monday if we make the finals.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.
CADad

We played the first game of our sub-district on Friday night. There are 5 teams competing in this phase of All Stars. After giving up 3 runs in the first, our boys sticks woke up and we won 10-4. Our next game is tomorrow night.

My son was 2 for 4. His first hit was over the SS head for a single and his second was a double down the 3B line to LF. His third AB was a deep shot to the LF gap but they had a shift on and the CF made a good catch. His last AB was a hard hit ball between the 3B and SS that the SS made a play on. He was also shifted toward 3B. I asked him if he saw the shift and he replied, "...not until the CF caught the ball!"

He'll figure it out. The good thing is that he is hitting the ball very hard and playing great 1B.

They had two double plays that my son was a part of. The first was a dribbler back to the pitcher who threw the ball to 1B for the out, then my son fired a rocket to the catcher for the out at the plate getting the runner trying to score from third. The second was a grounder hit to deep SS. The SS threw to 2B for the force and the 2B turned and threw to a s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d 1B for a bang, bang game ending double play.

R.

Sounds like the party is just getting started. Good luck to everyone.

1 down 2 to go. 3-2 squeaker.

How about your kids?

HCD,
Nice start. We play our first game tomorrow. Our last tournament we batted the entire roster through the whole tournament with free defensive substitution. We'll be going by real baseball rules in the sanctioned tournament of course and it is going to be a shock to a few players and parents.

CaDad you have a PM.

I just looked at the rules for our district/section tournament. We've got two pools, one with four teams and one with three. They are going to have pool A (four teams) play 3 games and pool B play 2 games. The winner of each pool will advance to the semis. Then according to the posted rules the next two teams will be determined based on the tiebreakers using only each teams first two games.

The tiebreakers are head to head which would not be likely to come into play, runs scored and then runs allowed.

If they are really doing what they say a team from pool A could end up 2-1 winning their first two games including a win against a team that went 0-3 and end up last while the 0-3 team could end up the 3rd seed.

It seems obvious that a teams record should be the first tiebreaker and I'm hoping that's the real situation.

Even so things are messed up because only one team from pool B could go 2-0 while two teams from pool A could go 2-0. Pool A's teams have to play 3 games before the semis and pool B only two.

The only fair way to run pool play with 7 teams would have been for it to be a single pool and for every team to play the same number of pool play games.

I agree and with 7 teams allow the host a first round bye for hosting (Hosting PONY Tourneys are alot of work, so if a team whines tell them to host next year) then use double elimination. Talk to the PONY Director and ask for a justification for the way things are set up.

We played our 2nd game of the sub-district this evening and won 4-0. It was a pitchers dual through 5 innings. My son hit a 2-run double in the 5th to finally get things going and we scored 2 more later in the inning. It was a very exciting game.

Tomorrow we play again. We are the only unbeaten team left in the double elimination tournament. If we win tomorrow against a team that we already beat 10-4 then we will face the team that we played tonight for the championship on Friday.

All the best,
R.

Great Start Cal!

Our second game is tonight. Winner goes to the final for PONY District 1. A loss means to more games to win in order to advance to Sectional.

We won last night 6-3. We play tonight for the sub district championship. If we win, we move on to the District tournament. If we lose, they will have to beat us again tomorrow.

Congrats! Wish I could say the same, we lost 6-4. Now we have to win a double header on Saturday to advance.

We had what was essentially a must win game in pool play against a fairly weak team yesterday. Our starter was struggling with the strike zone, gave up an infield single and a blooper and then some walks. A hit and a misplay later it was 4-0. We had 1st and 2nd with two outs and got a ridiculous call from the base ump on a grounder that was beaten out to take us out of the first inning. The next inning some more wildness made it 6-0. My son led off the bottom of the inning with a ball that short hopped the left field fence and we ended up scoring 4. We got it to 6-5 a couple innings later and with runners on first and third and one out they didn't hold my runner on first so I told my runner on third to "stay here, you aren't going anywhere." He proceeded to get picked off third by the catcher. We still managed to score one run on a misplay of theirs. We went to the 7th tied 6-6. They scored a couple runs on a hit, and then with a runner on third our first baseman threw home late trying to get the runner. The runner who reached first stole second and then I told my shortstop, my son, that he was playing too deep. He made a gesture saying he knew what he was doing and stayed deep. Next pitch was a slow roller to short. He charged made a nice scoop and throw, but the first baseman had stretched early because it was going to be a close play and couldn't handle the throw allowing the run to score.

Down 8-6 going into the bottom of the 7th with my #8 hitter coming to the plate. He flied out to center. I subbed in my (short) starter back into the #9 slot and told him to take until he got a strike. He walked on 4 pitches. I told my little leadoff hitter the same thing and he walked on 4 pitches. We scored one on an infield single off the pitcher's glove and then had our leadoff hitter on third with one out. I told him not to go on a high wild pitch because it would bounce right back to the catcher. Next pitch was a high wild pitch and he took off for home, tried to dive around the catcher who was standing there with the ball and was tagged out. The umpire missed the call and we got the run tying the game. They walked our cleanup hitter intentionally to load the bases and our next hitter grounded to short still scoring our runner from third with the infield drawn in for a 9-8 victory.

After the game I likened it to the old saying "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing."

We'll have to win today against a fairly strong team who'll have their best pitcher going against us since it is their first game to lock up a spot in the semi's. Even if we lose we still have a pretty good chance of making the semis, but I'd much rather win, be the 1 seed out of our pool and not have to wait for the results of other games to know if we made the semi's.

I think we have a decent shot at beating the number 2 team from the other pool in a semifinal game. I doubt if we could beat the #1 team in that game. If we can get to the #1 team in the finals it would be their third game in three days and we'd have a better shot at them.

We start our 13 yo District Tournament tommorrow in Lynwood. Need to win two games to advance as three teams advance. Like reading about the other teams in other tournaments. Thanks to all for sharing