So for those of you who do not know yet, I was sent down from Boise back to the team in Mesa in order to figure a couple of things out with my swing. I was struggling to make all of the adjustments that the coaching staff wanted me to make and I was almost overwhelmed at times. Anyone who has been in baseball for a reasonable amount of time will tell you that one thing you cannot do in baseball is think, you have to react, and I was struggling to do this with all of the changes being made to my swing. I'm not going to lie, I was extremely disappointed to suffer a setback, although it may be exactly what I needed.
Life in Arizona is unique to say the least. The temperature is routinely 110-115 and instead of thunderstorms and rain we get lightning and dust storms. That said, I was excited to have a fresh start and to have an opportunity to prove myself once again. Things have been going great on the baseball end as I have been hit my first two professional homeruns and, as of today, have my batting average up over .300. The schedule is a little different down here and is not quite as taxing as we play four days in a row and then have a day off every fifth day.
One of the coolest aspects of being in Mesa is that the facility we use is also where all of the guys in the organization who are rehabbing injuries come for treatment. For about the past week, Cubs catcher Geovany Soto has been here and so has the newly acquired B.J. Ryan. It's pretty awesome to be amongst some guys who have made it to the major leagues and who I have read about and watched on SportsCenter.
The season in Mesa goes until August 28th and hopefully sometime between now and then I can continue to play well and hopefully get another chance at a higher level, but for now I have learned to just worry about what is in my control.
Dance Off USF vs Uconn 2009 Big East Baseball Tournament
I haven't posted much of anything lately because a lot has been going on. My parents came out for our recent homestand versus Eugene and I had a great time with them. I have had a great experience so far in Boise, but I was also a little homesick and it was a lot of fun having the parents out so that they could have a better idea of what the town and the games are like. I also was hoping that the parents would bring some good luck with them from Ohio because I still could not figure everything out on the hitting end. I ended up playing in four of the five games while they were in the stands and the team won three of the games.
After the final game against Eugene, we left around 12:30 with a long trip ahead to Vancouver, Canada. And when I say long, I mean looooooooooooong. We had movies playing throughout the trip and most guys slept and the trip was actually pretty non-eventful until we got to the border. We got to the boarder into Canada at 11:00 in the morning and, as you could imagine, it started to get interesting. We ended up sitting on the bus for about two hours before we were allowed to cross into Canada as there was more than a little confusion with getting over 30 people from four different countries all on the same page. We had to fill out some paperwork before we were allowed to cross and of course the paperwork was in English on one side and French on the other. Needless to say, half of the team speaks Korean or Spanish and exactly zero speak French. All in all, the trip ended up taking almost 15 hours and we couldn't have been happier to have an off-day in Vancouver.
On the day off, a few of the guys ended up taking a cab to downtown Vancouver to see the city. I didn't realize how big the city of Vancouver actually was until we were walking the streets and there really weren't that many people downtown, especially considering the population is 3 million. For some unknown reason I didn't think about the the fact that even if you use American money, you get Canadian in return. This also led to me tipping our waitress at dinner anywhere between 50 cents and six dollars because I ended up just leaving the coins that I got back.
We just played our first game in Vancouver tonight and we played well but ended up losing again tonight. We have been playing better baseball and the wins are sure to follow.
