Baseball 2016

I had a post about Joey pitching almost two months ago, but I wanted to do one more post about his baseball season in general. He started out this season nervous about making the transition from machine pitch to kid pitch. He was really worried about getting hit by a pitch. The first half of the season was a little rough for him, and he got easily discouraged. We really had to build him up and encourage him to just try to make contact with the ball and not worry about anything else. 

About halfway through the season something clicked for him. It was really the night he pitched. Everything kind of came together: he started hitting well, looked much more confident in the field and pitched in every game after that first night. Of course as he did better, he started really enjoying playing and got more confidence so he kept getting better. The second half of the season was so fun to watch! 

We were so blessed to have an amazing group of coaches for Joey's team this year. They were such a great combination of being knowledgeable, instructive, encouraging and fun! They were very sweet to Joey and seemed to enjoy Joey's success at the end of the season almost as much as we did. They were very effusive in their praise for him and said that he made the most improvement on the team this season. 

All these pictures are thanks to a Dad on the team who took really great pictures of the team all season.   

 Here's a cool series of pictures of his pitching (if you click on the first picture and then scroll through using the arrows quickly it's kind of like a flip book!):

We're already looking forward to next season!