Reflections: Saturday at the 2010 Scout's Showcase

I just got back from the ballpark in Anchorage, where I spent the entire day watching baseball. It was the single greatest baseball experience of my life. I got tons of photos and videos, which I will share with you all eventually, but first I want to go ahead and type out some of the notes I've got. I don't have that much; by this point in the season it seems like I've seen most of the batters, anyway, so I don't have a lot of notes and the ones I do are mainly concerned with pitchers.

One cool thing I do have is velocities. I sat behind the scouts and had the luxury of having 20 radar guns pop up in front of my face every pitch, so I can finally post actual pitch speeds rather than just guesses as to whether a guy has "good" velocity or not. Some of my previous predictions were wrong, so that will be interesting. For what it's worth, these are all Stalker type guns.

I think I'll just post them all together into this one post, but break them up into the separate games. So here we go with game #1: 

Reflections/Photo Post: Panners @ Miners, 6/16/2010

Goldpanners C Austin Wooldridge has major league arm
strength when throwing to second.

The Mat-Su Miners fans had a nice cold one in this match-up, and I'm not talking about beer (though there was plenty of that going around, I'm sure). The night's battle with the visiting Goldpanners of Fairbanks was a long, chilly contest. The cloud cover has been continuous throughout the week, and as the game went on the wind began to blow out to right field and the rain started sprinkling. The 50 or so fans who stuck it out were all huddled together under blankets and sleeping bags, trying to block out the cold glacial breeze. Nonetheless, we got in a solid ballgame. And I got a few good pics and some good looks at some good players.

Tonight my stopwatch fingers were most successful with the catchers, timing their throws down to second. Both starting catchers really impressed me with their raw arm strength. Austin Wooldridge (Panners) and Kevin Whitehead (Miners) were both continuously throwing down to second in the neighbordhood of 1.9-2.0 seconds, glove-to-glove, which are solid major-league times. Kevin Roundtree came in for the Panners a later in the game; I only got one time on him but his throws in general didn't look as strong. That being said, he was hitting the target really nice, including a sweet throw out of DeBiassi in the seventh.

Kyle Brule got the start for the Goldpanners tonight. He started off strong and looked like he was hitting the catcher's glove exactly where it was set up. He was really making the mitt pop too, bringing a hard fastball. Things kind of unwound for him, though, about the time that Miners' DH David Lyon tagged him for a homer over the right field wall, and that was pretty much it. I really like what I saw when he was cruising early on, I guess the Miners might have just rattled his cage a bit.