Welcome back Catamount fans and thank you for checking out this week's Potomac State Baseball player diary. With time quickly closing on our opening day, we must continue to get better each second that we can. Practices have continued to get us ramped up for the season. Also, this week a group of the guys got together to watch WVU Mountaineer basketball on our off day.
This week live at bats started at the Friday practices. Joe Torre, a hall of fame player and manager, said “A winner is somebody who goes out there every day and exhausts himself trying to get something accomplished.” With winning being the goal, our mindset is to give everything that we have each day at practices. Jackson Harless, a left-handed pitcher, has worked hard over break and this spring to add a new wrinkle into his pitching. His hard work showed off during our live at bat sessions where he made some good pitches against good hitters. The catchers continue to do everything that they can to help make these days happen. With the first game being less than a month away, it felt good as a hitter to see live pitching again this week. After 3 days of live at bat practices, we practiced in our hitting groups on Tuesday and the infielders got in some solid defensive work on the turf. With the weather warming up for the day, the infielders got to have machine and live ground balls. This does not get to happen as often as everyone would like, so when the weather treats us right those guys look forward to every second of it. I talked with Trevor Thomas after their practice and asked him how it went. He said, “It went really well, it was nice to get some reps and the guys were excited to be outside.” He also commended his teammates for working hard and moving fast even with a lot going on.
On our off day, a group of us all got together to watch the WVU basketball game on ESPN. Most of the guys here are Mountaineer fans and facing Baylor, it was a big game. We started getting anxious for the start, so we decided to play a couple of games of poker, just for bragging rights of course. Sitting around the table was Jackson Taylor, Mac Messier, Dalton Benson, Trevor Thomas, James Riddle, and myself (Josh Hoffman). While the cards were being shuffled a lot of bragging was going on about who was the best player. Each one of us saying it was ourselves, by the time the first hand came out everyone was ready to prove who was the best. We quickly found out that none of us were exactly professional poker players. With that being said, everyone won their fair share of hands. With the game in pretty much of a standstill, time was running out before the start of the WVU game. We all knew there was only one thing left to do. We all pushed our chips in, and everyone was waiting for the rights cards. When the time came everyone flipped their hands and we all started looking at what the others had. I looked around and saw I beat Jackson and Mac... things are looking good... Then I looked at Dalton and saw I beat him. Thinking I had won this game, I stood up to celebrate and saw James smirking at me and I knew I was in trouble. James walked away as the winner, but his glory did not last long because the WVU game was on! We grilled up some burgers and watched the game. James made sure to keep reminding us that he was the best poker player. We like to try and spend time together as much as we can, and we look forward to it when we do!
Although the diary is about this season, there are some former teammates that we would like to wish good luck to for the start of the spring. We would like to wish Brandon Schaeffer (University of North Carolina) good luck as he has already impacted his new team in high regards. It is good to see him, and the other guys do well. We would also like to wish good luck to Graham Brown (Coastal Carolina), Zack Whitacre (Radford), Dale Houser (Millersville), and the rest of the guys still playing good luck as well. Being on a team with these guys set the standard and the expectations high, and we will continue to do everything we can to live up to them. Those guys showed us what it takes to move on and to play at a high level of baseball after JUCO. With our dreams being the same, we continue to work hard in efforts to have a great season!
Things are starting to get exciting with the sense of the season on our backs. We will continue to work hard and do our best to have a great season for the Catamounts. Hank Aaron once said, “In playing ball, and in life, a person occasionally gets the opportunity to do something great. When that time comes, only two things matter: being prepared to seize the moment and having the courage to take your best swing.” As we do everything we can to prepare, we move onto next week with the same mentality... keep getting better. Thank you all for reading this week's player diary. If you have not seen it go check out the video, you should give it a look. We got footage of this week's practices and some behind the scenes action at Potomac State.