Reflections/Photo Post: Fire @ Miners, 7-14-2010

Tyler Ruch's walk-off sac fly put the Miners over
the Fire in the bottom of the 9th.

EDIT: I made some corrections to this. I got my middle infielders dyslexified and referred to Matt Wessinger as Bret Schwartz. My bad. I am now giving Wessinger the credit where credit is due, and Schwartz is still cool. Thanks to the reader who made the catch; and let this be a lesson to those who would blog at 1 a.m.

It was a month ago to the day that I first saw the AIA Fire take on the Mat-Su Miners for my first game of the ABL season. Well, as chance would have it -- and I totally did not plan it to be this way -- I found myself, again, at a Fire at Miners game on the 14th of the month, which was last night. I took some pictures and made a few notes, but  most of all I was trying to get some video footage for the series of scouting videos I plan to post up on YouTube over the off-season. But for now, I'll share some of my thoughts and photos from the game with you.

One guy I should have had the camera on was Matt Wessinger (Miners). He looked phenomenal at second base tonight. He made some very good plays with the glove, including a great charge and off-balance flip to first to beat Will Watson by the thinnest hair and save an infield single against his team. Very good soft-handed defense on his part.

I have to tip my hat to Fire pitcher Harrison Helms, if for nothing else, creativity. With Miners on first base, Helms was having a fun time making them get their uniforms dirty diving back under the tags as he tried to keep them close. His best pickoff move of the night, though, was probably the one where he hid the ball in his hat as he pretended to wipe the sweat from his brow before making the throw to the bag. I suppose I could have just missed it all these years but I have never seen that before.

Random player notes from the past few days

The Goldpanners' DJ Crumlich, out of UC
Irvine, made some heads-up team plays.

I'm taking a little bit of time away from the ballpark, what with the Anchorage area being nearly deserted all weekend and for the next couple days, but I've been listening to the audio feeds and watching me some PannerVision when I can. Most of it has come in bits and pieces, though, so I haven't really had enough good stuff to put together a whole reflections post on an entire game. So instead of struggling through that, here's some quick notes about what I've managed to catch from the games, Saturday through Monday...

DJ Crumlich looked pretty good for the Goldpanners. He displayed some good heads-up base running early on, faking the steal home to distract the pitcher while Sikorski swiped second. He also made a pretty solid leaping catch. Tack on a hit and a run and he had himself a pretty good game.

I think Liam Baron (Panners) is a pretty cool cat. In fact, I think I've called him that before. Something about his demeanor says "cool cat" to me, I guess. Anyway, he's got a unique style, throwing lots of curveballs. My first thought was, "how many curves is this guy going to throw?" But there's some subtle differences in his, though, as he throws variations of his breaking ball from different arm slots to keep the batter off guard, mixing fastballs in for good measure. Three strikeouts on 2.1 IP and no earned runs on the evening to pick up the win last night. Whatever he's doing, he's doing it pretty well. I'm curious as to whether that's a strategy that a player can take very far into the pro ranks, but until someone proves him wrong, what the heck.

We already learned about Eddie Orozco (Oilers) and his no-hitter, but getting down to some of the nuts and bolts, he's pretty effective with mixing his pitches. He's got a good feel for his curveball and last night he was using it effectively, combined with his fastball, to get ahead in the count. It seemed like his strategy was to get way ahead of the hitter and then try and get him to chase junk, and it worked pretty well, obviously.