FAIRBORN — Awww, winter high school baseball scrimmage games. Gotta love ‘em.
No feeling in the extremities. Runny noses. Frozen “toeses.”
If frost bite wasn’t an issue, the jarring vibration of an ice cold aluminum bat making contact with a 60-plus mile per hour pitch, of what was more like a frozen rock than a baseball, was.
And that ball-to-bat contact was, more often than not, smacked into an inward blowing polar wind that stopped everything from having the slightest chance of going out of the park, Monday, March 19 on Fairborn’s Steve Risner Field at George Winkhouse Stadium.
Graham and host Fairborn toughed it out for seven innings, with the visiting Falcons scoring five runs in the top of the seventh to claim a 6-4 win that didn’t count in the standings.
Skyhawks coach Josh Patrick liked what he saw in his team’s first outing of the soon-to-be spring.
“We were very pleased with what we saw offensively today. We got a lot of quality at-bats from our guys,” Patrick said. “Early on, we scored some runs. Got some bunts over and had some good situational trips to the plate that enabled us to score some runs.
“But yeah, for a cold day and it being our first scrimmage of the season, guys were really barrelling the baseball and working deep into pitch counts. So we were really pleased with what we saw offensively.”
Cleanup hitter Kahlil “Ice Berg” Lettice singled home Mark “Polar” Peterangelo with the Skyhawks’ first run of the day in the first inning.
Andrew “Frozen Tundra” Trickett reached on a second-inning fielder’s choice play, advanced to third on a wild pitch and later scored to earn the Skyhawks their second run of the game.
Graham responded with a run in the fourth, and then plated five runs as the result of five singles and one hit batsman in the top half of the seventh to take the lead for good.
Fairborn collected eight hits. Garrison Secrest’s seventh-inning double was the only extra-base hit of the evening. Secrest and Hunter Warner both scored for the Skyhawks in the inning.
“We played 12 guys today,” Patrick said. “And the pitchers you saw today (Will Coleman, Trickett, Warner and warm basketball player turned chilly pitcher Jarod Bodekor) are probably the guys we’ll have in our rotation this season. I like how we look so far.”
A frigid fan mumbled about the possibility of there being snow for Fairborn’s next planned scrimmage contest Tuesday, March 20 at Chaminade Julienne’s Howell Field.
The just-as-frozen female fan next to him just shook her head.
“No! No! I’m sorry, but no! I will not watch baseball in the snow,” she muttered from under a heavy blanket and probably a dozen layers of clothing.
Even frozen Fairborn Skyhawks fans have their limits, when it comes to watching baseball games in the snow.
