High School Baseball SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS

The following conversations just took place in my newsroom.

In my left ear, a guy was on one phone asking "How many innings did you play?"

In my right ear, another guy was on the phone asking "How many errors did Northwest have?"

The final scores of those respective games were 26-1 and 33-0. Both were league games, so it wasn't like it was big schools beating up on some midgets.

Holy Christ. Is there a more uncompetitive venture in American sports than high school baseball? What a load of awful horse shit.

 

I'd say the same about high school softball. If you have a good pitcher, it doesn't matter if anyone else on the team even owns a glove.
If you don't, prepare to get 10-runned every night.

 

Like everything, it depends on the area/team. I've covered some very good baseball and softball.

 

I'll take baseball and softball over getting a phoner from a track meet. Even the people who know what they're doing will take 10 minutes reporting a track meet. Anyone have success getting schools to e-mail scores and boxes?

As for taking a game on the phone, covering some baseball/softball games can be brutal. Cold, wet, windy, pitcher can't get the ball over the plate, lips chapped to hell because you ate sunflower seeds, your scorebook an indecipherable mess due to the weather and the two or three innings where the teams batted around....ah the good ole days.

 

A high school team I covered a few years ago had a future ACC Pitcher of the Year on the roster. He was the No. 2 starter on his high school team. A kid drafted in the third round by the Brewers was the ace. He and another kid each broke the school's single-season home run record about midway through the regular season and went back and forth with it all year. Another kid who went on to become one of the better relievers in the college game barely pitched that year because he was about the fourth best arm on the team. This team played maybe one or two games all year that went more than five innings (it won the state championship game by 17 or 18 runs, I can't remember) and I met a bunch of pro scouts, so I liked covering them.

 

I umpired High School Baseball for years; Got sick to damn death of the 4 hour marathons that featured 39 runs, with a combined 13 hits, 14 errors, and 42 walks. I don't care how big you make the strikezone out here, high school baseball here is putrid.

Now switched to girls fast pitch softball. I'll gladly take a couple of 2-1, 1-0 games any old damn time.

 

Cross country and track are the worst for phoners, hands down. Our agate only contains winners and local kids and it can still take a while just for dual or triangular.

As for the weather, I still go back to when I played high school ball in Iowa; summertime season -- most games at night under the lights, never had a game called on account of snow and our postseason actually started after the regular season, not during it (sectional games start a few weeks before the regular season ends here).

 

Most of you must not have good high school baseball in your area. We've been lucky here -- four teams that have played for state championships in the past decade, one perennial power and more than our share of juco, college and even future pro players.

Beyond having successful teams, though, baseball is far and away my favorite high school sport to cover.
It's a million times more laid-back than football, where everything is super-regimented and the testosterone can flow like a river. The smaller teams can really allow you to get to know kids and their personalities and develop some feature hooks, too.
I know it's the same way in college, too. Ask any beat writer where the access is better and it should take them about a tenth of a second to answer.
The schedule isn't as brutal as basketball and soccer, with their boy-girl doubleheaders. Most coaches are smart enough to schedule afternoon games for Saturday. And, once you get past mid-March, the weather is awesome. Soccer is a winter sport here, so I'll take a lovely spring evening a zillion times over a windy, 45-degree night time soccer game or a stuffy, crowded gym.

Yeah, you get the occasional four-hour game. And those suck donkey balls. But give me baseball over just about any other sport.

 

You take track results over the phone?

 

Yeah, I'm blessed with some pretty good high school baseball, including three guys who will probably go in the Top 100 in the area. You get a few sucky games, but I'll take 50 aluminum-bat slugfests over a 1-0 soccer playoff game played in 20-degree weather.

As for taking call-ins, NOTHING is worse than track & field, though tennis is a close second. "And in No. 3 doubles ..."

 

What's the worst is taking results from a team that is in an area with a lot of Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants. Most of those last names are about 20 letters long.

 

High school baseball doesn't suck. Spring sports coaches do.