Thunderbird baseball gets ready for season
Jeff Moses
As the MLB playoffs are in their championship series stage the Mesa Thunderbird Baseball team took the field to play its first scrimmage against the Paradise Valley Pumas. The scrimmage wasn’t about stats, runs or even winning seeing as there was no umpire, no stat sheet and no scoreboard.
It was more about the coaches seeing what their players could do in game time situations.
The Thunderbirds played well offensively scoring nine runs in the eventual one run loss to the Pumas.
The best bats on the Thunderbird lineup belonged to shortstop Clay Hathaway, first basemen Kyle Pietryaga and outfielder Darien Johnson, who is a returning
All-American.
Coach Cirelli said of the three players “they all swung the bat well, and found the gaps well.”
Defensively however, was a different story. Cirelli described his team as “sloppy”, and said they made to many “mental mistakes”.
Though such growing pains should be expected seeing as he had at least two players in their first game-like situation at new positions: Hathaway who moved from second base to short stop and Pietryga who went from outfield to first base.
Hopefully, the explosive offense says more about the teams character then the spotty defense. At least Darien Johnson believes so when he said “on this team it will be contagious to do well.
