chat

Ok who wants to talk some baseball?

Nothing to do untill the Heels play Tech at 9. Who wants to chat?

chat anyone?

chat anyone? watch the colts and pats and talk some baseball.

Coach May

‘Fraid there’s no real use in watchin’ the game. Looks like Brady and the Pats are goona get the chance for another one!

Just a teeny bit about baseball, I can’t believe there’s so little traffic anywhere about the start of the HS season only being 10 days away!

Also, I can’t believe some of you HS coaches have so much time on your hands right now! The HC at the HS I’ll be scoring for this season is bizzier than a cat in a room full of rocking chairs! He’s been goin’ in to the fields early and comin’ home late for the last 2 weeks, and my guess is its gonna be even worse as the starting date gets closer.

Mebbe its because your school’s been around a while and this one’s only been open 2 years and will be playing its 1st V year this season.

You wouldn’t be a user of MaxPreps at http://www.maxpreps.com/ would you? I’m guessing not since when I went to NC, there wasn’t anything at all listed for baseball, like there is for states that use it like Fl, or Az, or Ca..

http://www.maxpreps.com/FanPages/StateMain.mxp/NorthCarolina

http://www.maxpreps.com/FanPages/State.mxp/Florida/Area...aseball_Spring_05-06

http://www.maxpreps.com/FanPages/State.mxp/Arizona/Area...aseball_Spring_05-06

http://www.maxpreps.com/FanPages/State.mxp/California/B...aseball_Spring_05-06

I’d love to find someone in another state who uses it so I can check and compare stats every once in a while. I realize the stats aren’t likely to be very good, but its interesting none-the-less.

Scorekeeper--You sure about that Patriot chance?

Well, at least the Colts made a game of it. But ya gotta admit, things looked pretty bleak for them.

Yea-at least now its a good game. Something to do until baseball season. We are starting to twitch at our house.

I know the feeling! Heck, this year is the 1st time in about 15 years my son isn’t playing, but I still can’t wait to get out there and watch the HS team!

I’ve had my Glover’s book and carrying case all cleaned up, made sure all my mechanical pencils have new lead in them with spares, been buggin’ the coach to get me my new copy of the NFHS rule book, and last week I put my 2 chairs and umbrella in the van!

Next week I'll have the wife break out my Hot/Cold cooler that plus into the cigar lighter in the car.

I’m ready!

What a great game! Just one step closer to football being over and baseball starting.

I will have all 4 kids in ball this year. My oldest (13 today!!) will be playing out of the bay area, my 10 yo might be with Hard 90 and the 8 and 6 yo are playing local LL. Guess I'm going to be busy and wonder why I was so restless.

What HS do you keep score for?

Pleasant Grove. Its in the Sac-Joaquin section, and they'll be playing in one of the Delta Leagues. The school is in the Elk Grove Unified School District, and as I said, they’ll be playing their 1st Varsity season ever.

I don’t think a lot of people understand what HS ball is like in a zoo such as we live in out here in most parts of the nuthouse state! In 1997, there were on 3 HS in our school district, and although they were fairly close together, less than 5 mi apart, they each pretty much shared the local talent.

Then I think they built the 1st new “mega school’ in 97, then the one my son attended in 98. Since then, in just our district, another new one opened in 2001, another in 2002, and yet another, the one I’m scoring for, in 2004.

These are all D1 schools, all are already overcrowded, and the farthest apart any 2 of them are is maybe 5 miles! That means that although the sports programs are all very big, the talent pool is extremely diluted!

FI, when my son was in HS and playing for tournament/travel teams, he was playing more games with kids going to other schools but in the same district, than anyone would believe. He was the only one from his school playing on the top shelf teams, and there was no school that had more than 3 players on any of those teams.

Maybe that’s why I don’t share the same high expectations about the high quality of players so many other folks do. Its not that those players weren’t here, but it was very seldom you’d see more than 2 really great ones on any one team. That made for the “average” HS player being something less than a baseball stud to me. That attitude has gotten me in trouble with a lot of folks because I don’t believe it takes a necessarily great player to make the HS team, or at least most of them.

quote:

Originally posted by Scorekeeper:
Angles can fly because they take themselves lightly.

That Pythagoras guy...he really had the right angle stuff! It's amazing the discipline he taught those angles, yet they turned out so relaxed. It's not easy to teach anything to fly.

Come to think of it...I wonder if he taught the Dutchman?

Scorekeeper if you will check what times I am on here you will see from 2pm untill 7pm I am nowhere to be found. Except on the baseball field. Once the season starts 2-12 it will be from 2pm untill 9pm. Ive never heard of that site but I will check it out.

quote:

Originally posted by Coach May:
Scorekeeper if you will check what times I am on here you will see from 2pm untill 7pm I am nowhere to be found. Except on the baseball field. Once the season starts 2-12 it will be from 2pm untill 9pm. Ive never heard of that site but I will check it out.

Sorry Coach May! I wasn’t taking a shot at you, but I was incredulous because I know how hard you guys have to work, especially this time of the year.

Is 2/12 the date for some special reason? As far as I know, out here it’s the 1st Mon in Feb.

Since you don’t use that particular site, what do you use, if anything? There are still some schools around here who prefer to use their own web site, but the number is dwindling.

Even taking the numbers that show up with a pretty healthy grain of salt, its funt to look at them and see what’s going on in the rest of the area. My son and I would look in there to keep tabs on the many friends he’d made playing in so many tourneys. It was fun.

And it was a bit of a help to anyone who really wanted to look, at least for some very basic things. FI, if you didn’t know much about a team, you could look there to find out who their studs were.

You might not know how to attack them, but at least you’d be warned. ;-)

Unless it makes you uncomfortable to do so, would you mind telling us what school you coach at.

NCPreps is where all the stat leaders are posted for NC HS baseball during the season. ERA leaders HR leaders AVG leaders RBI leaders etc etc. Just about every HS has their own website but most are not kept up on a regular basis and most do not because they dont want to be scouted. I coach at South Granville High School in Creedmoor NC. We start on 2-12 because each year it is mandated when we can start by the NC HS state athletic association. We actually play a scrimmage on 2-17 and open up the next week. We can play two scrimmage games and a total of 24 regular season games. With a conference tourney consisting of three games it comes out to 27 regular season games. Our state playoffs are one and done for four rounds and then 2-3 for the semi's and 2-3 for the finals. Once the HS season starts you can check NCPreps.com for all HS stats reported from HS coaches. Also Impactbaseball.com is a great site here in NC. They cover NC SC VA prospects and all the top players on a year long basis. They even have a prospects data base where they list the top players from 07 08 09 10 class. Hope this helps you out.

I went to NC Preps and was dismayed to see nothing at all about baseball. Was I looking in the wrong place? http://ncpreps.rivals.com/

I think its pathetic that HS coaches should worry so much about other teams scouting theirs. What could anyone really learn that isn’t pretty much common knowledge in that very small baseball community where word-of-mouth is often faster and more accurate than the WWW?

Besides, I’d think coaches would leap at an opportunity to show their players off. The scouts I’ve talked to don’t place much value on the numbers they get for HS players, but they do seem to use the top 100 lists to at least give them guidelines as to how to schedule their visits.

Have you Googled “South Granville High School in Creedmoor baseball”? Y’all have quite a few things on the WWW to peek at when ya want.

WOSERS! Only 5 days to make cuts and put playing in some semblance of order? That sure seems like hustlin’ to me! Typically, our schools spend a week or more just making cuts, then at least another full week before intrasquads, then another week before scrimmages.

That’s just another thing I think is so unfair about HS baseball! Tell the FB or BB programs they only had a week or 2 of practice before their 1st scrimmages. The coaches would all have strokes!

That’s pretty much the same number of games we have out here too. Of course Ca has no state baseball championship yet, but what you’re describing is much the same way each of our 10 sections works.

Its too bad all these players and all the data from every state can’t be combined into one place! But I guess that’s asking too much for right now. ;-)

I’ll try to look in on your team every now and again. Would you care to make any predictions for the season?

ncpreps is seaonal scorekeeper. Once baseball season starts they devote the site to baseball. It is pretty in depth as far as stats from across the state. Again Impactbaseball.com does an outstanding job of keeping up with HS baseball in NC and SC VA as well. As far as coaches not putting up stats on their teams this is up to the individual coach. You would be surprised how little you can know about a team in the playoffs. We do not play sectionals in other words your first game in the playoffs can be against a team that is hundreds of miles away from you. We usually try to scout them before hand and make numerous calls to coaches that have played them etc etc. As far as predictions we should have another very good team this year. Our pitching will be deep and talented. Sr RHP Chris Luck 6'3 195 Sits the 86-88 range and hits 90. Jr Pratt Maynard 6'0 210 sits in the 85-87 range. Jr Nash Blackley 6'3 190 sits in the 84-86 range. Sr Josh Peyton 5'11 185 lower 80's great command. Soph Josh Darroach 5'10 165 lower 80's very good controll. Jr Catcher Jeff May 6'1 200 All State last year and Player of the year in the conference hit .524 with 10hrs and 44 rbi's. We finished last season at 20-9 and lost out in the third round of the state playoffs. We return 8 starters from that team and all our pitching as well. We should be ranked around #3 or #4 in the 3-A ranks this year. If we get some production from the bottom of the batting order this season we could go a long way in the playoffs.

I guess I just like to see baseball stuff all year long. ;-) I’ll definitely check both sites out later in the season.

Its up to the coaches out here if they want to do it, and what they do too. I’d say that in general, the coaches who don’t have scorekeepers, don’t spend a lot of time putting data on line. When I did it for my boy’s team, and the way it’ll work this year is, the coach will give me his secret password into MaxPreps.

Then what I’ll do is keep the book, give him his own personal stats after every game, call in the scores to the local paper, write the little game update for the small local rag, enter all the stats into MaxPreps, then write the little newsletter after every game, and put the newsletter and the stats up on my site so the parents can have access to them.

You can see any of that stuff at http://infosports.net/scorekeeper/ then choosing any of the stat things or newsletters.

I know there’s a lot of pretty good coaches out there, but not too many have the extra time I do so they can do that for themselves.

Heck, you don’t have to tell me that when its playoff time, its pretty much like flyin’ blind as far as what you really know about the other teams. I got stuck scouting for the boy’s team one year, and it was a waste. The team I was scouting used a very different lineup for us, and we never got a sniff of any of the pitchers they’d used in the 2 previous games.

Heck, even though our sections aren’t anywhere near as big as the state, they way they set the playoffs up, you never play a team on suicide Saturday that you play during the season. Then, for that next level, it’s a pretty slim possibility that you’ll see a team from your league there either.

The year my boy’s team made it to the 2nd round, it was the 1st time 3 teams from the same league made it that far. We eventually lost to a team in our league, but other than that, we didn’t know squat about anyone we played. That next level is even worse because they go through the whole thing all over again for all the sections in NorCal. It gets pretty bizarre.

I suppose the phone calls are happening fast and furious all over the country at the end of the year with people trying to get an edge. The fella who coaches the most successful team by far in our league has a pretty neat take on that though. He says he just get the kids ready to go play another game and doesn’t worry about it. Prolly that’s jut as good a method as any other. ;-)

That’s some pretty insane pitching. I’ve never seen even one HS team out here with 4 P’s who could really throw in the 80’s, let alone 6, and 5 of them are over the mid 80s. You guys wouldn’t lose a game out here, at least in our section, and its no pushover at all with I think 40+ D1 schools, that’s 2,000+ students.

It sounds as though you’ll definitely have a monster year. I sure wish you the best of luck.

Coach May,

Good luck with the upcoming season. It sounds like you have many of the pieces of your puzzle that will make this a great year.