Summing Up The Summer

Three weeks ago, some overly optimistic blogger promised a forthcoming blog post "later this week" on the stats compiled by 9U Blue over the summer. Hopefully, you understood that "later this week" meant "sometime in August," so here we go.

First, the basics. 9U Blue finished the summer with an overall record of 24-1. Two of those wins and the one loss came in a 10U tournament, so we're going to take out those three games for the purposes of these stats. The overall record against 9U teams was 22-0.

In the 22 games against age-group competition, West Raleigh outscored opponents 292-37. That's an average of approximately 13-2 per game over the course of the summer. The average stayed fairly constant once Ripken play--ostensibly against West Raleigh's peers--began. In the area, state and regional tournaments, 9U Blue outscored opponents by a combined 171-21, or an average of 12.2-1.5 over the 14 games. To put that another way, West Raleigh opponents scored a total of 21 runs in the three Ripken tournaments. That's how many runs 9U Blue scored in just one game of the state tournament (the win over Winterville).

Supposedly, the beginning of kid-pitch was going to neutralize the big West Raleigh bats that had terrorized 7U and 8U opponents. Instead, the squad hit .438 as a team and posted a team on-base percentage of .551. That means that factoring in the patience to take walks, this year's on-base percentage was almost exactly the same as last summer's against the machine (.586).

If you're wondering exactly how often you were nervous this summer, the answer is: not very. West Raleigh trailed at the end of just nine of the 97 innings (9.3%) that it played against age group competition.

In the first summer of kid-pitch competition, six different 9U Blue pitchers had ERAs of 2.00 or lower. And that's not just throwing one good inning and then never pitching again. Included among those six sub-2.00 pitchers were the three most frequently used pitchers (based on innings) and four of the top five most frequently used pitchers.

How good was the pitching? In the Southeast Regional, against the best teams in the region, the seven West Raleigh hurlers who saw action gave up just ten earned runs in the six games, for an average of just 1.7 earned runs per game. To put that stinginess into perspective, the 9U offense scored more than ten runs in one inning of the championship game.

In other words, it was another incredible summer of baseball by an incredible group of kids and an apparently somewhat passable group of coaches.