Thinking about the season:

This is, as I noted earlier, the first year for the coaches and most of the team in the A league. We had three 7th-graders, but only one of them (Jake) played in the A league last year – Nate was in traveling ball and AJ didn’t play in 6th grade. Two years ago, when we moved up to the B league as the Mudcats, we had a tough season – it was the first year pitching for any of the guys, which added a whole new dimension to the game.

Our team was, on the average, younger than most of the teams we were facing, and I noticed a pretty significant correlation between the age of the team and their performance – not a sure thing, but if you were to bet on the older team to win, you’d probably win your bet in most MAA games. This is not surprising, given the amount of growing most boys are doing between the ages of 11 and 13, but I saw height disparities of something like 18 inches between the tallest and the shortest players.

We really only lost to three teams. We played a total of 18 games this season – 12 regular-season, 3 summerfest and 3 tournament.

In the regular season, we lost to 3 teams: Giants in the first game of the season, Nationals and Royals in the last two.

In Summerfest, we lost to the Royals in game 1 and the Red Sox in game 3 (we beat the Cardinals in game 2, the only time we saw them all season).

In the tournament, we beat the Giants (putting us 1-1 on the season with them) in game 1, then lost to the Red Sox (again) in game 2 and to the Royals (again) in game 3.

So, teams we lost to at all: Giants, Nationals, Red Sox, Royals. But we came back and evened up the season with the Giants at 1-1, meaning (as I see it), that we only lost to three teams: Nationals, Red Sox (twice) and Royals (three times).