An Eventful Weekend

June 2, 2010

I recently told Arlo that I would attempt to make more frequent Sombrero posts, but this weekend was a busy one for me.  I was in Denver attending the Calcote/Lucero bachelor party.  Jason Calcote is a lifelong friend of mine and was kind enough to invite me to be one of the groomsmen in his upcoming wedding.  Garret Lucero is another friend of mine, and the two decided to have a combined party up in Denver so that we could catch part of the Dodgers/Rox series.  It was a fun weekend.  I’m going to leave it at that.

A lot of baseball stuff happened over the weekend, though, so I’m going to attempt to condense it all into a reasonably brief post.  Probably the sweetest thing for New Mexican baseball that took place over the holiday weekend was UNM’s at-large bid into a regional.  The selection, which took place early Monday morning, was the program’s first selection in almost half a century.  They open up against Stanford as a three-seed in the Fullerton regional.  I truly believe they have an honest to God shot at making it into the round of 16.  With wins against Texas, TCU, and a couple other schools that have spent time in the top-25, this group appears to have all the requisite preparation for games of this magnitude.

In other Lobo news, Piedra Vista graduate, Damion Lovato, signed a letter of intent to join the UNM program in the fall.  In doing so Lovato became the second player from the most recent Panther graduating class to commit to the Lobos alongside recently dubbed AAAA Player of the Year, Jake McCasland.  As mentioned previously here at the Sombrero, club ball teammate Eli Freese joins these two standouts under Coach Birmingham next season in Albuquerque.  We all expect and look forward to great careers from these players in the red and black.

I have had the pleasure of coaching Damion in both school and club ball, and my opinion is that Damion’s strike zone judgment combined with exceptional bat speed make him easily one of the premier hitters in the state and occasionally the best hitter in Farmington.  His size and athleticism make him a draftable player with potentially another decade of baseball left to play.  Damion was also an honor graduate a week ago and legend now has it that the slam he hit in the first inning of the recent state title game against Moriarty High traveled in excess of 450 feet.

Lovato and Freese are also anxiously anticipating their opening game of the Connie Mack season at Ricketts Wednesday evening.  As members of the Farmington Cardinals, they have a great deal of expectations to live up to.  The consensus among our coaching staff, however, seems to be that this Cardinals squad possesses the unique combination of dedication, talent, and skills that were perhaps missing from last year’s Cardinals, who missed not only a birth in the CMWS but also a trip to the the city league title game.  Workouts have been going very smoothly thus far, and our out-of-area ringers are supposed to have arrived in town this morning for a 7 AM workout and 1 PM practice and meeting.

Doc tossed a perfect game.  That trade is looking more and more genius for the Phils.

Eat-a flew out to the desert over the weekend where he was shown around the stadium and allowed to sit in during trade negotiations as well as observe closely a former Cy Young winner’s rehab in the club’s gym.  He’s getting closer everybody.

In recent Heights Knights news, Ervin Santana dazzled once again yesterday afternoon firing 7 innings of one-run ball while striking out six and walking none.  I attained Santana because of an unusual Denslow Cup mistake when a competing manager dropped him in the middle of April.  I now have Lilly, Niemann, and Santana, all of whom were acquired from the free agent list.  How could this be?  My hypothesis as to why arms of this quality were available free agents is that our league’s evaluation of pitching is a tad behind our evaluation of hitters.  The fact that we use innings-pitched as an additional category provides these horses with increased value over their standard roto rankings because they tend to pitch unusually deep into games.  The Cup’s evaluation of hitting is starting to be comparable amongst owners, but clearly pitching is not yet at that level and is providing owners like myself with an inefficiency to exploit.

Lastly, Whitney is insisting that we attend a game of the Cubs/White Sox series later this month when she is in Chicago for her summer internship.  I consider myself lucky for this.

Hope everybody had a nice holiday weekend.

Go Cardinals!