Heaps of lollies

Well I have been very busy this week pretty much putting in 12-14 hours of baseball and PR work every day. I have been working a camp down where a team called the Perth Heat play. This team is made up of Australian players, most of which are or have played professional baseball in the state's. I was in charge of T-ball players along with the the American that I was in touch with here before I came. I think I was spoiled with the little kids up here in the Perth Hills where I am coaching and forgot how bratty other kids, namely the kids from the city can be. It was fun ,and interesting as most of the coaches and kids consider T-ball to be a different sport than baseball. Some of the T-ball kids were going on 14 years old! Ridiculous if you ask me, but they didn't ask me. I still managed to throw my two cents in to the t-ball director and he agreed.

After the camps I do training with the three teams I am managing, along with overseeing the little league and T-ball teams in the hills. This has left little time to go exploring or take pictures of the wildlife and area but we do promise to get some up as soon as we can. On Sunday I had our team play a scratch match against ourselves. It went pretty well and we had a decent turn out. I can not overstate how different it is from the baseball I am used to. These guys are just out to have fun but are very competitive as well and I am sure they will be even more so when we play another opponent. They spend a lot of time talking trash to each other. They could not believe that we do not do that in the states at the professional level. It gets pretty funny and they gave it to me pretty good when I had my first at bat and struck out. I have been telling them that I have not hit in 10 years but I have been crushing in BP but it will take me a while to get the feel in the box again. I did hit a double and single later in the game and although she did get me out I did put the ball in play off of the girl on my team. I am sure I would have never heard the end of that.

Toward the end of the game I threw 2 innings. There were several people who had come to watch just that so I felt I owed it to them to actual throw like I normally would. I was planning on just grooving fastballs to let the guys hit as a lot of the other pitchers were walking "heaps" of people. I struck out 9 in a row in two innings. For those of you questioning my math, the catcher dropped 4 strikeout pitches and only threw out one at first. Anyways it was fun and all the guys and people watching had a great time heckling and that is what its all about.

We have our first game on Sunday against the University of Western Australia. It was not fun setting rosters and disappointing people, but I made it through, now we just need to win the first one.

Oh yea, last night Liz and I watched two Kangaroos play what looked like Tag or Chase with three ducks on the Baseball field in the twilight. It was something I'll never forget. The Kangaroos were very interested in us. It seemed like they actually came out of the Bush to see what were were all doing. Then they started hopping back and forth. I could barely see something scurrying around on the ground, changing directions and occasional taking flight. I eventually could see it was a duck. I asked my assistant coach Jason about it and he said they love to chase things around like that, but never hurt them. "They are vegetarians mate," he said "Too easy mate."