"And That's All She Wrote"

Well the Olympics are officially over for the China Baseball team. We lost to a Major League team today, Cuba: 17-1. They are impressive! Every hitter that walked up there reminded me of Manny Ramirez. Great athletic and strong bodies, great batting stances and even more impressive swings. They had 21 hits off of our pitchers and 20 of them were over the middle of the plate. I told our pitchers before the game that we have to live on the corners. If you miss, go right back to the corners. Never feel the urge to just throw it over for a strike. We will take or chances on them swinging at our pitches or we walk them.

I have never seen so many balls hit hard even though they were down the middle. A lot of times the hitter gets anxious to hit a home run and pulls off of the ball and hits a pop up or a ground ball. Not today, it was literally batting practice. Every time but one when we made a good pitch we got them out. Good pitches always gets good hitters out. A mantra that I have been preaching to the boys since my insertion as pitching coach. For most of the year and most of the Olympics they took hold of that mantra and executed their pitches.

I am extremely proud of what our boys did in the Olympics. We played good hard baseball and ended up winning one game and scaring two and a half teams of defeat.

I will recap our accomplishments and put them into perspective in a future post but now I am going to the museum. My wife asked me to take her and Eve to the museum. See the photo below to view my reaction.