first start

Facing an old nemesis of mine from Australia, in our first game of the season, Locky Elldridge, the lefty from Glenelg, who I think I was 0-4 lifetime with 2 strikeouts already, continued his dominance against me as I went 0-3 with a walk and a run scored (as DH), as we got smashed by DSS in game 1 of the season... 12-3

Check out all the scores throughout the season and from around the league including news from baseball all over the Netherlands... here:

http://home.planet.nl/~stoov/bbslam.htm#scores1k

I started the away game on Sunday in Haarlem at a really nice stadium... and as usual had a little rough start in the 1st inning, compounded by a few errors.
I pitched well, although, going away from my fastball on the still frigid afternoon, and throwing more and more sliders so I could get more strikeouts and less groundballs, since we were missing 2 regulars from our lineup. When I started going to the slider in the 3rd inning, I recorded 6 strikeouts in the ensuing 3 innings... I left the game in the 6th inning as we were trailing by by 6 runs. My final line looked like this:
6 innings, 1 earned run, 6 runs, 6 strikeouts, 4 walks, 4 hits

The summary from the game was simple... we can't give a team 4 outs every inning (every inning we committed an error except in the 2nd, a 1-2-3 inning) ... botched double plays hurt us a lot, and if you cut half those errors in half it's suddenly a 3-1 or 2-1 game...

I think we have a solid ball club, there's a lot of young talent but not a ton of leadership. We can definitely be competitive in the First Division against some good competition but it's going to always be a battle and we're going to have to cut down on our own mistakes and mental lapses if we want to win games against tougher ball clubs...