It may have rained the rest of the weekend, but the weather dieties conspired to give us a really nice Saturday morning for Andrew’s first baseball game. Bright, sunny, high seventies/low eighties, with just a hint of breeze.

The game was scheduled to start at 11am, with practice/warm-ups beginning at 10:15am. We left the house well before 9:30, as we’d never been to this part of the county before (the kids play on a couple of different parks around the county). We still ended up running a little late, as the schedule lacked some useful specifics. We hit the elementary and high schools before finally arriving at the proper park at the middle school in the Matoaca region of Chesterfield County (which is kind of off the beaten path; at least the path I tend to beat).

We weren’t the last ones to arrive (there were only two or three kids from the other team there when we got there). I suspect they’ll be more specific in the future.

With the six year olds, it’s “coach pitch” (they offer tee ball, but never have enough kids), and I think they give the kids nine or ten strikes before calling them “out”; there’s plenty of leeway to improve the kids’ confidence. However, being new to this, however, and not having a dad who’s really sworn serious fealty to the ball-sports gods (particularly baseball, which is kinda dull on TV), Andrew was a little nervous, not really knowing the game (many of the scheduled practices over the last couple of weeks were rained out). Still, I give the kid credit; he stuck it out, and managed to focus on the game, as well as, and in some cases, better than, the other kids on the team.

He struck out the first time up, but his second time at bat, he hit a solid single, and eventually got around the bases (having a little trouble finding second), to score, which got him a little more excited about his prospects.

His team won; I don’t think anybody remembers the score, but it was kind of a blowout – our pack of six-year-olds was slightly less comically inept than the other pack of six year olds (they’re six; they don’t quite have a handle on how their bodies work yet), causing the score to ratchet up dramatically once they got rolling. And, in honor of his first hit ever, Andrew got the honor of receiving the game ball, which thrilled him.

The only camera we had was my cell phone, but we managed to capture a couple of shots, which are posted here. Don’t worry, we have a game pretty much every saturday for the next eight or nine weeks – I’ll get some better pictures down the road.

In the meantime, enjoy!