High School Baseball is a wild time
Sophomore season is winding down for my son and it's been a crazy year. Highschool ball is all over the place these days.
Multiple schools DQ'd from the playoffs on the day the playoffs started due to "anonymous emails" claiming ineligible kids. Rumors that every school is 'under investigation' including my son's. Apparently we passed because we stayed in it lol.
Ages are all over the place. My son is 15, sophomore. Another sophomore at his school turned 17 four months ago. Another school has a 'freshman' that turned 16 last August, lol. Nobody really knows what grade the home schooled kids are. PBR will highlight them as a '29 one day and then rank them with the '28 class the next. Parents claim they're still in 8th grade or something.
PBR is picking Futures Games kids based off who went to the most PBR events instead of the actual best kids. .200avg, leads the team in K's and defensive errors, attended a dozen PBR events, invited! Other sophomore at that school named to 1st team all-league, only 1 PBR event, no thanks. Not even my son or my son's school by the way. Just observations. One kid told my son he should be on the team but that he needs to go to the next PBR event and suck up to the local director. Yea, right.
On the bright side of things - Son's school qualified for the 5A state tournament for the first time in 10+ years. Run ruled a nationally ranked private school powerhouse in the playoffs, nice dose of humble pie for them to take from a lowly public school.
Son also finished the season with the highest batting average on his varsity team, .442 one of 3 kids with multiple HR's. His reward? Benched for 3 of the final 4 playoff games. Kids he got benched for went a combined 0-4 with 4 K's and a couple walks, literally didn't put a single ball in play in 3 games. Son finally got to pinch hit for one of them in the bottom of 7th of the championship game down 3-1, immediately hits a leadoff single. Hate to be that parent, but oh coach, buddy, what are you doing. My wife and I just cracked up.
2 years down, 2 more to go. Looking forward to next year, his team has several very talented underclassmen coming back next year.
PSA : get your kids eyes checked. My son got put on prescription contacts a week before the season and said it completely changed his vision at the plate. He never knew his vision was not normal and said it made tracking pitches much easier. We feel terrible that we never knew but he literally never said anything.