It's baseball season again!

All winter I look forward to baseball season, but never as much as this past winter. I've played in a Stelco league in Hamilton for the past 10 or 12 years, but this year, I'm playing in a hi-tech league in Waterloo, as a member of the iAnywhere Mobilizers. We played our first game tonight. We had fun, even though we got slaughtered. The other team singled and doubled us to death (with a couple of homers in there for good measure), while we couldn't get much going offensively. I had a couple of singles, one ground out to second, and one line out to second. Actually, my two singles were just to the right of second base as well, so I hit the ball 4 times to exactly the same place. I played OK in right field - blew my first play in the first inning when the ball took a weird bounce right in front of me and skipped by my glove, and I overthrew the shortstop once. Not much was hit to me though, so I just ran around a lot.

This league is a little different from the Stelco league:

• The field is completely fenced in, and not in a public park. No more delaying the game because some old lady decides to walk across our field as a shortcut home from the grocery store.
• You're allowed to slide into 2nd and 3rd. Doubt I ever will though.
• There are five outfielders, though there were still times where it would have been nice to have another one.
• The field has lights! No more playing the last couple of innings quickly so we can beat the darkness, or losing the ball because it's too dark to see it.

One slight drawback of this league is that there are a lot more teams and therefore players, and you don't always know people on the other teams, so there ends up being less camaraderie between teams. In the Stelco league, most players have been playing for years, so everyone knows everyone on all the teams. Not too big a deal though - the people on my team are nice. I already knew most of the team, but there were a couple of co-ops I didn't know, and the twin sister (Teesha) of one of the team captains (Caryn) is on the team as well. I don't know Caryn all that well, so telling them apart will be a challenge, but they're both very friendly, and made me feel very welcome on the team - Caryn actually said that they were glad that I came out for the team. Now, she said that before I blew the play in the outfield, not after... but then again, I think everyone blew at least one play, so I was in good company.

One other difference between this league and the Stelco one is that in the Stelco league, all games were 6:00 on Wednesday. In this league, games start anywhere from 5:30 to 9:30, and any day from Monday to Thursday - some weeks there are two games, other weeks we don't play at all. That throws a wrench into our weekly schedule somewhat, since a lot of our games are Thursday nights, and so I may have to move my guitar lessons to Friday afternoons. Not a big deal though. This league is also much better organized than the Stelco one (it even has its own web site), so that is a major plus. I've officially dumped the stelcoball.com site I was running for the Stelco league - very few people went to the site, and the commissioner wasn't interested in sending me results, so the standings and game results were always out of date. I've even cancelled the domain name - I believe I still own it until August sometime, after which it vanishes.

My arm is going to hurt tomorrow...