The Official Blog of OC Athletics
Sunday, October 07, 2007
OC Baseball Fans,
If you happen to drive by our field this week, you’ll see that our grass is really taking off and is very green. I mowed the infield for the first time by hand and it really looks good. It is still a bit bumpy, as is the case with new sod, but we have Martin Lane scheduled to come in on October 15th to top dress the new grass with sand to smooth out the surface.
I delivered our final dugout plans to the contractor on Friday and we hope to be starting their construction in the near future. Mike Hancock has graciously agreed to assist us with the construction of the dugouts and a concrete wall at the base of the backstop that will extend from dugout to dugout.
I also met with baseball alumnus Jackson Greene, a local fence contractor, and he and I will team up on the design and construction of the outfield fencing. The outfield fence will have that old ballpark appearance and feel of vertical wood slats with a small gap between the boards. It reminds me of the early baseball stories from major league parks where they recalled small boys who would stand on the outside of the outfield fence and watch the game through the gaps in the fencing; they called them the “Knot Hole Gang.” The boys would watch and wait with anticipation until a player hit a home run and then would chase the ball down when it came over the fence.
The team had a six-inning intrasquad scrimmage on Friday, our first since our scrimmage against Northern Oklahoma College. I was encouraged by our hitting. I feel like our pitchers also are improving, but I thought they threw far too many pitches. We need our pitchers to be more aggressive early in the count and get ahead of the hitters. I like our aggressiveness on the bases and the overall team speed. We plan on scrimmaging again on Monday and finishing up practice on Thursday before we break for fall break. Please check back again with us next week as we continue to update our progress on our team and facility.
Take care and God bless,
Chuck White