The first team deposit of $500 is due today.

Bring your first $50 installment to practice this evening, or mail it to Coach Jones asap.

Practice is at 5pm at the Greentree Sportsplex.

Today’s league meeting was rescheduled for next weekend.

Everyone be on the lookout for potential sponsors. It’s a bad of a time try to solicit money, but everyone can at least ask their boss and the manager of their favorite bar.

Quack.

Ducks Practice this Sunday at 5pm
Greentree Sportsplex:
600 Iron City Dr.
Pittsburgh, PA 15205.

Mapquest that address or click on this link: directions to sportsplex

On Monday at 7pm we’ll have a modified, scrimmage game against the Black Sox at the Sportsplex.
it will be the most intense indoor bullpen session with live batters and catchers with hits decided by the coaches that has ever occurred during February in Greentree.

There’s supposed to be a league meeting on Sunday.
Get your money to TC,
go to this post for his address.

Sorosky is out of his mind, literally and figuratively:
checkout his GrayBats/Pitt Greensburgh Blog
Good stuff, I admire his confidence.
Quack away in his comment section.

I wrote this about the Super Bowl

Spagnola’s T-shirt guy can get us shirts for around six bucks apiece, but we’d have to order 50 of them.
We’d all be on the hook for part of the other 30 or so shirts, (about $10 wholesale in shirts per player) which we could sell to our fans to pay for our own away jerseys.
It’s worth considering.
other shirt vendors are in the $9-$12 per shirt range for 30 shirts so the total money is close, but we wouldn’t have a wonderful T-shirt surplus to use for fund raising.

We will need to know how many new players we will have by March 1st so we can order green jerseys.

Go Ducks.

Fantastic White Stripes video

Here’s the gist:

Groundhogs vs. Prowlers Tonight

Bad News for the Prowlers.

Sharks 6, Groundhogs 0

The sharks starting pitcher was a poor man’s Dan “Venkman” Morgan.

Venkman is nursing a shoulder sprain. Godspeed, Dr. Morgan.

He had a beard, but his breaking ball was terrible.
He was good pals with the umpire. No lie. The strategy was to throw the ball shin high and a foot off the plate, forcing the opposition to swing at bad pitches.
The strategy was effective.

Joe Graff pitched four innings allowing 3 unearned runs.
Vinny Gala allowed three more unearned runs in 3 innings of relief.

The Sharks played error free ball, the Groundhogs did not.
a couple walks and a coupel errors and the game ended 6-0.

The Groundhogs couldn’t get anything going.
Vinny Gala got on base a couple times, but Mike Martin left his Bullldogs teammate stranded.
This angered Gregg “wino” so much that he challenged Martin to a wrestling match between innings

***

The Groundhogs infielder Randy Soles played a manic depressive game at three different infield positions, making some spectacular plays, but throwing away a routine ball that allowed the first of the Sharks runs.

Gala threw two shutout innings before a couple walks in the seventh led to more errors and more unearned runs.

Graff and Wino singled.
Gala walked twice for a .500 obp.
Gwin was 1-4 with a triple.
Graff singled and was picked off first before Gwin tripled in the sixth.
He was safe, the umpire was mud.

The Groundhogs look to bring more energy to their next game against the Prowlers.

We still need a pitcher.

Larry Zalewski was a late drop from the Groundhogs roster. A family emergency was taken by Zalewski as a sign to forgo the Winter session.

As much as Larry deserves to be given grief for not naming his team the Grays, he’s a good man who loves the game.

Keep Larry’s family in your thoughts and prayers.
Some things are more important than playing modified rules, indoor baseball.

The Gray Bats are getting off to a great start in the trash-talking department. Too bad they don’t have a shortstop.

go to this blog and leave angry comments:

http://bobcatsbaseball.blogspot.com/

or this blog:

http://graybats2009.blogspot.com/

The Gray Bats have more blogs than outfielders.

Zalewski has seriously missed a great opportunity to incorporate a piece of Pittsburgh history into our league, by taking on the moniker of a great Negro League team, instead naming his team after a blind, bug-eating, cave-dwelling winged, beast.

From Wkipedia:

The Gray Bat (Myotis grisescens) is a small bat that lives in caves throughout the southern United States. It usually chooses caves which are located within one mile of a river or reservoir.

Description

The gray bat typically weighs 8-13 g. Its diet consists predominantly of insects. All species of the genus Myotis, including the gray bat, rest by day and forage at night. They often hunt and feed over water. The feeding flight usually alternate with periods of rest, during which the bats hang to digest their catch. Colonies of the gray bat travel up to 14 km from roosts to foraging areas. The gray bat has a wingspan of about 11-12 inches and is uniformly dark gray. The grey bat is aptly named due to its pigmentation.

The Gray Bats is the nickname of an amateur adult baseball team in the Pittsburgh NABA. The Pittsburgh Gray Bats won the PIttsburgh NABA Fall Ball title, and will compete in their first full season in the summer of 2009.

The Gray Bats were founded by head coach, Larry Zalewski, an aging hippie who has a thing for endangered species, and jogging. Coincidentally, Zalewski is also blind and lives in a cave.

Star pitcher Ben Sorosky (of the Pitt-Greensburg Bobcats) joined this team (which refuses to call itself the “Grays” after the Homestead Grays of the Negro League) out of pity, and will rue the day he committed to the Gray Bats, who, despite winning the fall title, will surely finish with a mediocre record in their first season in the Pittsburgh NABA summer league.

Habitat

Gray bats use warm caves in the summer where they establish maternal and bachelor colonies. Few have been found present outside caves. In the winter they hibernate in a few cold caves.

[edit] Range

The range of the endangered gray bat is concentrated in the cave regions of Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, with occasional colonies and individuals found in adjacent states. The species’ present total population is estimated to number over 1,500,000; however, a study in 1982 estimated that about 95 percent of the bats hibernate in only nine caves in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri,Illinois,and Tennessee. Another study published in 1991 indicated the number of important caves to be eight: two in Tennessee; three in Missouri; and one each in Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas. The gray bat’s range overlaps with that of the Indiana bat, also endangered.

[edit] Endangered status

Although gray bat numbers are still relatively high, their total population has decreased significantly during recent years. The gray bat is thought to have declined mainly due to destruction by vandals and disturbance by spelunkers and tourists. The reliance of the species on relatively few hibernacula is also a major reason behind its endangered status.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the gray bat as an endangered species on April 28, 1976.

Zalewski and I are teammates on the Groundhogs this winter. My goal will be to get him to change the name of his team to the Grays.

Quack.

I’m on the Bulldogs indoor baseball team, I think we may be able to add a player or two to the roster if anyone is interested, we have no pitchers.

Bulldog Mike Martin shares a video of his off-season training regimen.

I’m going to push for a name change, how about the Groundhogs, in honor of Groundhog Day.

Bill Murray, Genius.

In fact, the Bulldogs indoor team will be referred to as the “Groundhogs” on this blog for the remainder of the winter season.

Go Groundhogs!

***
DUCKS

Opening Day is April 18th, three months away.
We’re going to start winter workouts next week.
Mark Guthrie, Les Gies (sp.?) and myself will run practice while Dr. Jones coaches basketball.

Indiana Jones does not like the call.

We have two choices;
We can roll the dice with the Cost Center by Pitt’s intramural field, which is free, but it’s a crap shoot as to the availability of the cage, or we can meet at the Greentree Sportsplex once a week as a team, where we will be guaranteed cages, room to throw, and our pitchers and catchers can get in some work. This will cost $15 per hour for the bullpen, and we’ll have to pay for tokens, but we have an NABA discount, which is nice.

Either way, three weeks from now, the Black Sox have invited us to play in a few controlled scrimmages at the Sportsplex, on Mondays starting Feb. 10th.
Look for an email regarding this.

NABA Legend Kenny Rayl; Black Sox owner, GM, head coach, player,
equipment manager, water boy, bat boy, statistician, advanced scout, Head of Player Development, and Assistant to the Traveling Secretary.

***

Check out the previous post for Dr. Jone’s address.
Send him a check for the first installment of league dues.
Feel free to root through his garbage.

Sponsorship Money will be hard to come by, but we have to try. Ask anyone and everyone.